Primary School Allocations: ACCEPT YOUR PLACE!

[Jinglesplodge]

Just a quick heads-up to anyone who has been allocated a school place they are unhappy with today - please make sure you accept the place you are given and then work from there.

If you decline your place then the local authority have discharged their duty to offer you a place and you may find yourself completely stuck.

If you accept your place you remain in the system and you can begin the process of getting onto the waiting lists of any school you'd prefer, and making an appeal if you have grounds to do so.

Every year on here there's at least one family who get caught out by this: they are angry and disappointed about the place they've been given so they decline it and then fund themselves out of the system. Please only decline if you're willing to homeschool!

Good luck, everyone. Hope you get the schools you're hoping for.

Small bump to get this noticed. It's super important.

BUMP for the tea time crowd.

Definitely check whether you need to accept or not. We did not for secondary. I had to read it several times to be sure though and home schooling is an option here.

Don't want to bugger it up after all the effort of visiting schools etc.

I just double checked my email. We only have to respond if we want to refuse the place (Lincolnshire). They work on the presumption that the offered place will be accepted here.

I got my email at 8am, then read this a few hours later and was reminded (I am happily accepting the place but hadn't thought about responding to say so). I have spent a long time trying to work out from the email how to accept. It literally just listed the schools I applied for and said either 'offered' or 'discarded higher preference offered' with no other information. The post must have come very late today because I just discovered the letter from the council stating the school place we have been given with a form to return to the school to accept it. That was confusing. This is for DC2 but I could not remember what had happened 4 years ago when we applied for DC1.

Ah yes, fair enough. My title should really have read "do not decline your place". People who are planning to appeal or try to get into another school need to know they're off the local authority's hands as soon as they decline, so if they want their child to have any school place they need to accept the one they have and work from there. If you're from an auto-accept area then obviously there's no need to act.

Accept your place is catchier and it is worth checking whether you have to do anything.

Phew, I didn't have to do anything, but thank you for your thread as I did go back and re-read the email to be 100% sure. Luckily no surprises for me.

We have secondary admissions to look forward to in October though, much more worried about that.