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.

Apparently the trick is renting for two years. That is a long term move, not a scam. Yeah right. I also think, but have no proof, that schools quite like such motivated families and so can't be bothered to turn them away in favour of people who may not be so eager for a good school

totalrecall1 - but it's not just ensuring the best opportunity for your children. It is also dishonestly depriving another genuinely in-catchment child of a place by buying ir renting an additional property with some of the high salary you get because your parents did the same dishonest thing . Thus perpetuating the unfairness of the system.

The unfairness of the system is caused by a lack of well performing schools not by individuals who move to good catchment areas.

schools quite like such motivated families
of course and what admissions authority or school really has the money and resources to waste investigating admissions fraud, and at the end of the day why do they actually care that the pupil doesn't like within (say) 3km of the school especially when the family have shown a willingness to jump through hoops for their kids' education.

OP you are aggressive to anybody who disagrees with you. The family lived there for 2 years, they have inconvenienced themselves for 2 years, they didn't move out the next day the school started, so your anger with them is completely inappropriate. I am sure you will start using offensive language now and saying you don't understand what I am saying but you should think a bit that maybe you are not right and people who argue with you are not necessarily lacking intelligence or integrity.

I think I have only posted sharply to one poster who insisted, three times, that I disapprove because of "sour grapes". I think I'm allowed to defend myself against false accusations.

Many people agree with me on the thread. If its quiet at work tomorrow I might tot up the yabus and the yanbus and see where it stands.

Its still sour grapes. Somehow you think acting within published rules that you dont quite understand is cheating.

Its not. Get over it.

How rude.

You sound jealous.

Where I live (not UK), they draw a lottery for secondary school places.

Even the mayor's daughter was placed at her "least wanted". She's enjoying it now.

It great because it helps to distribute class and wealth better than youbullshit.

It's

JUst to clarify on my previous post, many apologies if the caps lock indicated I was shouting, I use caps at work a lot and I left it on, I just get used to seeing it.
I have worked in jobs as well were I see hard workers and greasy pole climbers, many pole climbers did what they needed to get were they wanted and inspite of bosses noting what they were doing they let them proceed, why, they knew what they were doing and wanted rid, I would to.
The hard workers got a good name for them selves, over time built a good reputation and did go places but with huge backing from their bosses and are well respected, the others I heard aren't well received as they are described as smarmy, brown noses, micey etc.
Patience and hard work gets you where you need to be bending rules and exploiting loopholes, may get you to where you want but at what cost to your reputation? Believe be people can see through it and in my experience don't have as much respect than for those same who have been more patient and hard working. It has nothing to do with sitting back and moaning this is lazy, reputation and hard work and good integrity count for an awful lot, believe be Ive seen it happen.

totalrecall: yet that high achieving school didn't manage to teach you proper use of the reflexive pronoun.

Sibling priority has been lost in our area so the admission criteria goes:
-Taken care for children/dc in local authority care
-P1 catchment (this is a small area around the site of the old school before it was re built many years ago)
-P2 catchment
-Siblings in P1
-Siblings in Pl
-Siblings out of catchment
-All other out of catchment

It is over subscribed. I think the trouble with any time requirement on residence is that it would punish renters. We rent and if the LL decides to sell we have to go. My ds is 2.8 so if we had to move we would consider local schools when doing so. I'd be a bit pissed off if we moved to a house right in the catchment and couldn't get a place because we hadn't been there long enough.

"totalrecall: yet that high achieving school didn't manage to teach you proper use of the reflexive pronoun."

Exactly that. TR has made it clear - what matters is how much they are earning now. And that the life lesson they have taken from it is that "do whatever you have to, even lying or cheating, to get you and your children ahead. Anyone who doesn't do this is just a moaner"

I think I like the lottery idea, within a geographical boundary obvs. It might also mean that people push for all schools to improve rather than accepting there will be some good and some bad schools.

LAs have little power on what academies and free schools do. They get the blame when things go wrong but do not have to power or authority to intervene.

It's not just parents cheating - sometimes the whole system has anomalies.

I worked at a CofE secondary school in the NW. When it was oversubscribed it caused all sorts of problems. This was before cared for children, SEN children got to the top of the list. It was based on Church attendance. However the school body was made up of 6 main constituent churches.

Each one applying it's own variation of the church membership requirement. The parish priest signing the actual application.

Some would sign anything, others requiring weekly attendance over 24 months. My church had signing in lists and we took a middle line - even this caused problems. People signing in for a friend, some slipping in and then out after signing the sheet.

Some parents would name a priest on their form - one who was long gone or dead.

We abandoned this and simply said you have to be known to the church. So far this has worked - for us.

The application forms were over complicated which tended to get a self selecting population of pupils in the school. To put it bluntly - less able children - with less able parents found it difficult to make a successful application/fill in the form correctly/favourably.

The school is full, it does well, gets good results and pupils look smart and presentable. I left, for unrelated reasons, and went to another school that was a little more 'real world'

The whole application/selection procedure could bring out the worst in some.

It's hard to make it fair to all and not allow sharp practice.

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.

I don't know why you have repeated your question about evidence of cheating. I explained that I think short-term renting while keeping hold of another house nearby that you then move back to should be seen as dishonest by the school and I'm surprised that it apparently hasn't.

You bolded the 'keeping hold of another house' upthread. You can't allow the government to make these kinds of investigations (do you own another house? what are your plans for this house? do you plan to move back?) because it's fascist. You set residency requirements and let people provide proof of address. That's it.

"The reason the country is in such an abysmal mess is because of apathetic parenting. "

Those bloody apathetic parents. Closing down heavy industry. Dismantling the welfare state. Causing chaos in the NHS. Making the population get older. Increasing pension liabilities.

What a very silly remark. One could easily argue:

"People being taught it is each to their own and the devil take the hindmost is the reason is in such an abysmal mess" - with every bit as much conviction and every bit as much evidence.

Lottery means more and longer school runs; makes it more difficult to ahve out-of-hours activities because an already long day becomes impossibly long; and interferes with out-of-hours friendships.

Children are not property to be allocated as the subjects of social engineering.

I suppose you think it's the state's fault that 30% of schoolchildren have not one book in their home.

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.

they are all in charge of their own admissions

Academies and VA schools are in charge of their own admissions policy. The LA still runs the co-ordinated admissions scheme. Many (probably most) LAs that have a problem with renting run checks before passing applications on to schools. If they discover that parents are living in rented accommodation whilst owning a house in the area (information they can get from checking Council Tax records) many will just give the school the address of the house the parents own and ignore the rented address. They should also have a blacklist of addresses they know are let out for admissions purposes. Any application using one of those addresses will be investigated.

If the LA discovers that an application is fraudulent during the admissions process they will use the correct address for the family. The parents are not generally informed of this so there are certainly parents out there who believe they got a place through renting but actually wasted their money.

It isn't over once the child has a place. The offer can still be removed if the application is found to be fraudulent or deliberately misleading, even after the child has started at school. Many LAs will only remove the place during the first term but some have removed places even later. This happens far more than people think it does. I know of cases where parents would have got their child into a decent school if they had been honest, rented to get a place at an outstanding school and succeeded initially but were then found out. Their child's place at the outstanding school was removed and, because the decent school was full, they ended up with a place at the local sink school. Far from helping their child, their actions left their child in a worse situation than if they had been honest.

As has been mentioned above, some schools and LAs only give sibling priority to those still living near the school in an effort to stop people getting their first child in then moving away. This is becoming more widespread. However, for academies this is up to the school, not the LA.

People do rent to get places. Some of them succeed. I doubt that it will ever be possible to weed out all such applications. But most LAs that have a significant problem (and many that don't) are doing everything they can to clamp down on this.

"I suppose you think it's the state's fault that 30% of schoolchildren have not one book in their home."

Interested to find out what the actual fuck this has to do with schools admissions policy?

But you know, blame all of the countries woes on parents. That seems reasonable.

Growing up we didn't have books in the house, my parents had low level manual jobs (when they had work) and sent us to the local school because it was the done thing. Yet I have done INCREDIBLY well out of life whilst not looking to screw over other people.

I find your lack of consistency and logic disturbing. Are you sure you are filling your house with the right books?

We moved 2 miles up the road when I was 11 so I would be in the catchment for the local grammar school. 5 years later we moved back to the original village - it was a through 11-18 school so it did not matter for sixth form.

Ok 5 years is longer than 2, and we didn't keep the original house, but it's not a lot different. It was still about playing the system so I didn't have to go to the comp in the other direction.

As for HMRC - how do you know that they did not declare the income from the rental?

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? It also feels like a race to the bottom - because I can't get my child into a decent school I don't want anyone to go there. A bit like the arguments about grammar schools, my child won't get in so I don't want anyone to benefit from them.

That said I am a bit hypocritical as I have a big problem with state-funded faith schools. But discrimination is not allowed in the workplace so it's despicable that it is perpetuated against children.

"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?" This, and the race to the bottom argument really don't hold up.

So the environmentalist argument falls down because we don't know which parents drive anyway (and drop their kids off on the way), which schools are close to parents work places rather than homes, so might lead to a fuel saving, which are on bus routes etc. It's lovely in that idyllic "I live next to the school and then go home and don't do anything else all day" - but that doesn't make sense. Also, how do you know under the current system that parents are not moving further away from work to be near good schools? It could actually be beneficial from an environmental point of view. And if you are THAT bothered and can move, you will wait until a place is allotted and then move anyway. It's pure fluff to confuse the argument.

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.