Secondary appeal - not offered place from feeder school

Yes I do definitely feel vindicated! I'm surprised the school let the situation carry on as long as it did really - to be in a situation where the school is supposed to be comprehensive, but you basically can't get in if you're in the top 20%+ of local kids, was just a bit absurd.

DD isn't even in top sets in secondary, it's not like it's just cutting off a few exceptionally high performers it's a huge chunk of the local community that it was cutting out.

Sorry I was far too casual with my language when I wrote the original post, I simply meant EHCPs. And I've just bumped the thread with an update so the situation is now resolved - the failure to get a place had nothing to do with the number of children with EHCPs/SEN, they were not unusually high, nor were the number of siblings.

The only reason DD didn't get a place was because they were in the top group in the school's banding test (as were more than 1 in 5 children who took the test) but the school had so few places top band (below 10) that the only children who got a place in that band were those that already had siblings in the school, and not even all of them got in.

Just coming back to this thread with an update.

The original situation was we were appealing for a secondary place at a school where DD was at a feeder primary school with priority in the admissions criteria, but didn’t get a place due to school’s use of a banding test. We didn’t win our appeal.

As expected, there was never any movement on the waiting list within the top band (despite lots of movement in other bands) so amongst the nearly 1 in 4 applicants who got a top band score and didn’t have a sibling at the school already, none ever got a place.

Thr secondary has just announced they are planning to remove the banding test for future years (but retain the feeder school. Which having written to the head and governors asking them to review their policy, I will take as a win (even though it doesn’t help us).

DD is settling in well at their new school so we have made peace with it.

I think this is the only thing that makes sense, as I initially couldn't really understand how they'd summarised our case in the decision letter - it doesn't explicitly say that hey discounted the argument, it just largely ignores that we made it.

It's not technically a through school, they just tried to make it effectively all-through via feeder priority. But I can see how a panel might have treated that in the same way.

(I don't want to say what other people's outcomes were as I don't think it's my place to say, given small numbers involved and fact that some people on this thread know the schools involved)

So having caught up with other people who were appealing as well, my observations are:

I think we were somewhat disadvantaged by having made our second choice school our "insurance" option rather than ranking simply best>worst (however unlikely we were to get a place). If we'd put the insurance in 6th and made our 2nd-5th preferences schools we stood no chance of getting into we might have had a better argument. The panel clearly came back to the fact we'd be offered our second choice school: in their mind - why put it as second choice if it wasn't suitable?

I also think they gave no/very little weight to the fact DC has an existing relationship to the school - that was the central theme of our argument, which I thought was quite well evidenced (both in terms DC's particular need for stability, and in terms of how the "all through" education the schools' offered provide that stability). But that didn't seem to factor into their decision, so that left us with quite a weak case (given we were happy to concede there was little objectively wrong with the school we accepted, it was the absence of familiarity and consistency that was problem).

Thank you - I've only heard good things about the school we've been offered so hopefully it will work out.

Thank you! It really has been a lot of work - I've not really gone into DC's needs here (partly because this whole thread is quite identifying, I know some people have figured out the school involved) but there's been lots involved in gathering evidence on that front.

But yes the school we've ended up with is one that wasn't originally on our radar and has a lot of good things going for it, so maybe everything happens for a reason?

Well it wasn't good news - just received the decision letter in the post and we were unsuccessful.

Ultimately I'm not surprised, though I was hoping the letter might provide some insight into how the panel made the decision, which it doesn't at all. And the summary of our stage 2 is really quite terrible and doesn't really reflect our argument at all.

Which just leaves me feeling rather frustrated - I'd like to have been able to walk away from this thinking "that's not the decision we wanted, but at least I understand why you made it" and now I'm left thinking "did you actually understand why we were appealing at all?".

We get a physical letter through the post. I know other parents appealing snd none of us have heard so it’s not just our letter that has gone astray or anything.

Thanks for thinking of us!

Still waiting!!! Slightly losing our minds at this point, it has been over three weeks!

I’ll update when we hear, surely can’t be too much longer! We were told to expect longer than the standard 5 school days because of the number of appeals being held but I didn’t think it would be this long.