to surprised that this sort of cheating for a secondary school place still goes on?

[bibbitybobbityyhat]

I thought the schools were generally supposed to be more on top of this sort of scam:

Family outside catchment of highly desirable school let out their house, move to a rented house within catchment for two years to go through admission process and get their first dd into the school, then move back to their original family home. Now their next three dd's will go to that school even though they all now live outside of the catchment!

A feel a certain sort of contempt for people who would do this, and am really surprised that schools still turn a blind eye.

[Tabsicle]

I'm also mildly bemused as to how it's abusing the system to rent a house in a popular catchment area but everyone is ok with houses in those catchment areas going for £££ higher than other similar properties elsewhere. The whole system is skewed for wealthier and more determined parents. Renting for two years is only a part of it.

I'm also unsure how the OP thinks it should be policed. The family were living in the catchment area. Or should the school demand sight of their bank statements to check for other properties? Or give precedence to home owners who have shown proper commitment to the area? I just have no idea what is expected.

[EssentialHummus]

I also disagree with the race to the bottom. As we have heard all of these parents care most about their children. So spreading them amongst schools mean that every school will have really determined parents who make time to get involved and engaged in school life. It should have the effect of improving the school, not making them all worse.

Or there may be a resurgence in demand for private places among the middle classes, from people (like us) who would rather not pay but could if we had to. I.e. if you drew Grime Comp in the lottery, you (I) may not accept it and just exercise your spending power instead. Who knows? The lottery system may work, or just lead to a different version of the same.

[MumTryingHerBest]

t4nut Tue Its still sour grapes.

How did your DCs get on with regards to school place allocation, out of interest.

[unexpsoc]

"Or there may be a resurgence in demand for private places among the middle classes, from people (like us) who would rather not pay but could if we had to. "

Hold on, if you can pay and you aren't, doesn't that make you a bad parent according to the base definition some here use (ie you do whatever it takes for your kids)? I should add some sort of smiley face here - but not sure how.

It could lead to an increase in people going to public school. Of course, there is a separate argument around whether they should exist.

But very few people could afford private schools (average cost of £12k per year per child). The amount of impact this would have (given the average salary is around £27,000 and lots at the top end already do this) would be minimal. Notwithstanding that private schools don't have the places. So I am not sure the impact would be big enough to even measure.

[MumTryingHerBest]

Tabsicle Or give precedence to home owners who have shown proper commitment to the area?

If a school is supposed to be serving the local community then yes, they should be prioritising those who have shown proper commitment to the local area over those who are just briefly passing through for the convenience of accessing the educational services.

One point to consider is how much educational tourism affects the planning of future school places. Where are local children supposed to go if school places are being take up by families intending to only do a short stop off in the area in order to take advantage of the educational services on offer? The requirement of schools places is projected from the birth rate in the localised area (or at least it is where I live).

I live in the Outer London area and I frequently hear parents moaning that there are not many good secondary schools in Harrow. Of course there isn't, large numbers of children from Harrow travel to North London, Slough, Kent, Bucks & Herts to access the selective school system.

[t4nut]

Tabsicle

I think you'll find its one of those things where what's demanded by the incensed and offended one goes up to the point where they get what they want or are advantaged.

[kungfupannda]

The problem with tightening the rules up is that there's a risk of knock-on effect to other families who aren't doing anything wrong. The rules have to be so well thought-out to avoid penalising people unfairly, and LAs don't always seem to think things through to their logical conclusion.

Our area has changed its sibling priority rules, presumably to try and deal with exactly this scenario, so you have to be within 1.45 miles of a school, or it has to be your local school, to keep your sibling priority. It goes looked after children, then a selection of sibling priorities (in catchment, out of catchment, nearest school, with distance as the distinguishing feature), nearest school and no sibling, then non-nearest school and no sibling, allocated on distance.

Fair enough on paper, but there are a lot of small rural schools that have become very popular over the last few years, due to new builds going up around them. Families who've been living a couple of miles away from their nearest schools are suddenly finding they're not close enough to get their first child in, so that child gets allocated a school somewhere else. Then the sibling comes along and doesn't get sibling priority at that school because it's not the nearest school. You could finish up with a family with children allocated to multiple schools, through absolutely no fault of their own.

[Tabsicle]

MumTryingHerBest - seriously? Home owners get priority over renters?

[MuseumOfCurry]

The reason the country is in such an abysmal mess is because of apathetic parenting. Good one anyone who will move heaven and earth to get their child a good education.

Yes, that is definitely the sole reason we are in such mess, people haven't bent the admissions policy of schools to breaking point enough. Nothing to do with a slew of complex economic and political problems. Just not enough jiggery pokery on the admissions front.

I'm not suggesting that bending school admissions policies to one's will is the answer to everyone's problem. This is, obviously, a zero-sum game and it's obviously not adhering with the spirit of the catchment policy.

I simply can't muster any judgement for someone who is willing to agitate to this extent for their child's education.

If everyone were this proactive about their child's education, then there would be far, far fewer inadequate schools and fewer cases of these school catchment hijinks.

These are the parents who on balance produce the same profile of children who anti-private school types complain about private schools siphoning off of state schools, leaving them with insufficiently diluted volumes of low-achieving, problematic children. Sorry to be so crass but I'm just paraphrasing what I see on here all the time.

[404NotFound]

People are missing the point about moving house/renting not being illegal. Of course there are legitimate reasons why people need to move house. That is why, when LAs or schools have clamped down on admissions fraud, the key point to be proved is that you have relinquished the connection with your previous address.

So a family selling their home and buying a new one in catchment area is fine. Ditto a family who are renting and terminate their rental in one area and move to another. Even owning and renting for legitimate reasons is covered, as usually some specification about commuting distance, so a family who own a house in Sheffield but are renting in London for work purposes would probably be fine.

It is perfectly possible for schools/LAs to crack down on admissions fraud 'creative address management' for admissions purposes . This splendid little graphic illustrates what happens when a LA actually implements its own policies - scroll down to the map and click on 2014 vs 2015 to see the effect. And note that the biggest effect is for ability band A, which we can hypothesise is the band in which pushy families with the resources to play the system are most likely to be overrepresented.

And no, it's not sour grapes on my part, as we didn't apply to this school (although we would have been comfortably within the 2015 cutoff distance). I just subscribe to the notion that there shouldn't be a two-tier education system for people with the know-how and the means to game the system.

[EssentialHummus]

Hold on, if you can pay and you aren't, doesn't that make you a bad parent according to the base definition some here use (ie you do whatever it takes for your kids)?

Yup, probably! Round my way there's the phenomenon of high earners choosing the local super-duper state secondary. Houses worth £1m plus. Catchment the size of my ass. It just about makes sense to spend money on the catchment property on the basis of saving £300k plus on fees for two or more children, but if a lottery was introduced I'd fuck off to outer London and pay fees.

I see this a lot near us, but whether it would have a wider effect, who knows?

[bibbitybobbityyhat]

Tabsicle
prh47bridge's post at 10.47am today on this thread answers your question about what I think Local Authorities should be doing and what many LAs already are doing.

[bigTillyMint]

bibbity, of course they don't stop it - it benefits them to keep MC families at the school as it is likely that they will achieve well and make the school look good.

[MumTryingHerBest]

Tabsicle MumTryingHerBest - seriously? Home owners get priority over renters?

No, home owners and long term renters i.e. those who actually integrate themselves into the local community get priority over short term renters who use their temporary accommodation to circumvent the admissions criteria.

believe me, I live in an area where rental properties are at a premium due to the fairly large number of people using a postcode for a year with the sole intention of returning back to the family home once a place has been secured. When you over hear conversations about whether someone will get away with renting for 3 months or 6 months etc. it makes you realise how out of hand it is all getting. It is also why one of my local schools are now asking for a 2 year rental agreement for any rental addresses.

BTW, my local schools give priority to the children of families who are forced to change address frequently due to jobs e.g. armed forces etc.

If a family has a real reason for renting for a short period (i.e. less than 12 months) they have the opportunity to demonstrate the need when the LEA get in touch to establish legitimacy.

[sparechange]

As for allocating places by lottery. that's really eco-friendly. So I live within walking distance of my local school and then have to get a bus or be taken by car?

There are 2 ultra-desirable primary schools near me. Both have catchment areas of under 400m (yes, metres)
But because of all the playing of the system for so, so long, if you go to either road for the school run, you'll find the streets clogged by cars, and also long queues at the bus stops

Because the well-known scam is for the parents to 'split up' and rent a flat in catchment for the period of the application and then miraculously get back together and move back to the big family home in a cheaper part of London several miles away once the term has started.

So there is nothing eco-friendly about the current system around my way...

[Arseicle]

Hold on, if you can pay and you aren't, doesn't that make you a bad parent according to the base definition some here use (ie you do whatever it takes for your kids)

No, not if you don't need to pay, if you can get into a good school for free, of course not. If you only got them into a crappy school and could afford to send them to a better one but refused, then maybe.

[sparechange]

I've just checked and this year, the catchment for one of the schools was 180m! There are now so many out of catchment siblings that children can't get into a school that is 2 mins walk from their front door...

[unexpsoc]

The catchment area for my son's school is less than 300m (defined as the parish boundary). It includes houses on one side of some roads being in, and the other side being out. There is a noticeable price difference (about £30k) for houses on different sides of the road.

[Idliketobeabutterfly]

TBh not sure about where everyone else lives but our council is currently allowing a lot of extra housing despite the fact there is not enough primary places, storing up problems for a few years time and years after that when the birth rate rose again.
unless they build more schools, or classrooms, its going to get worse.

[ConferencePear]

No-one seems to be concerned that for each child who gets into a 'good' school some other child loses out.

[unexpsoc]

It's OK! Theresa May is going to fix it by re-introducing grammar schools!

[LoremIpsum]

Looking in from the outside, there's a kind of madness to the education system in the UK. We moved away just before the dcs would have started school but after the first round of trying to understand the options and applying for places. While I still miss the UK in many, many ways, I sometimes feel like we dodged a bullet there.

The amount of energy the system demands, and uncertainty it offers, just to secure a school place seems counterproductive. By introducing choice and competition for state school places, the system manufactures a high level of inequality between individual schools. The lure of good and better and sought after schools requires the contrast of average, blah and shunned schools or there'd be no point to the choice model. It's created this consuming dance to secure a place that seems to pit parents against each other. If you're busy monitoring who might have manipulated LA rules, or worried about how you're going to juggle multiple drop offs at different schools for siblings or seeing one child securing a place as another losing it (madness) then as a parent body you have less power to monitor and have input into the overall education system.

No system or country is perfect, but the sheer unnecessary complexity and inequality that's been engineered into the English state system is striking. I know people talk about the unfairness of the post-code lottery, but in my experience the inequality created by guaranteed places within defined catchments can, at least partially, be addressed via needs-based and adequate funding. Yes there are problems involved in providing guaranteed places, but addressing them seems simpler, and far less frantic, than the allocation procedure you all go through. Frankly, after reading MN threads at this time of year, I feel like you all deserve a medal just for navigating the system in the first place.

[EssentialHummus]

Great post lorem.

My DH - educated in soviet Russia - cannot get his head around why the education system here runs the way it does. To his mind, the idea of a catchment school being "full", or one being so desirable that you need to move to send your DC there, is genuinely absurd. You showed up to your closest school on Day 1, registered, and off you went.

[ClaireBlunderwood]

404NotFound that graphic is extraordinary. I wonder if it's a blip or a genuine result of the council cracking down. I was once talking to a group of Camden Girls and not a single one of them lived anywhere near the school. I personally know of four families who've done the renting, all of whom have two or three daughters.

To all those bleating about 'sour grapes' or suggesting that we should admire people who do this: how would you feel if your child failed to get into the school you wanted because others did this. Would you say, oh well, dc's not going to the excellent school down the road, but fair play to the renters, they must care more about their child than I do? Or would you report them to the council? Because somebody's child is denied a place every time someone does this and 99 times out of a hundred, it's a child from a less advantaged family than the one that got the place.

[404NotFound]

Claire - yes, it is, isn't it? I did the full open-mouthed gawp thing the first time I saw it. And nope, it's not a blip, this year's admissions distance for Band A girls is pretty similar to the 2015 distance - it's not on the CSG website, but it is in the new Camden secondary admissions booklet.

I don't want to say anything potentially libellous, but there are definitely lots of girls at CSG who live nowhere near the 0.5 miles that has been the cutoff for many many years, so I think there has been an awful lot of gaming the system going on. I wonder if the school's almost cult-like appeal will wane a bit now that the intake area extends all the way to [gasp] Archway?