To expect my son to get into a school less than 50m from me

[Rumpleteezer]

When I know all the places will go to siblings in September 2018 :(

social geography is soooo interesting :)

We live near 2 schools

One catchment area is mainly elderly bungalows the other has larger town houses and are more affordable, plus assorted council houses

First school gets 20 applications the other 60 applications

Both schools hold the same number of children, except the first one has larger grounds and 2 halls

Council refuse year on year to extend the boundaries, thus creating one over crowed school and one under occupied school with mixed year groups.

The second school is now having to bring in portacanins and split lunch times

Makes no sense

so Green why do the parents not get together and petition the LA to improve this situation? it takes time but the squeaky wheel does get the grease and you take it up higher and higher until the situation is a reasonable improvement for everyone.

Siblings numbers do vary each year. DS1 has a lot of 2/3y+ siblings in the school and 3y- siblings to go up next year. DS2 is the only 2y- sibling to join this year. I'm not sure that there are any older siblings in DS2's class, I don't recognise any other parents moving to the reception door from KS1 or KS2, but there is a lot of babies/ toddlers in prams to come up in the next 2-3 years.

Our catchment is very small and an odd slice of the neighbourhood. When the suburb was built, it was years before the school was even built and then it only had a single class intake for a suburb of 14,000 people Most children have to be ferried out to neighbouring suburbs by car due to patchy public transport links to surrounding schools.
People do end up out of catchment as they shuffle around the neighbourhood as they upgrade home, yet it remains the nearest school due to poor design of the area.

Always put the school you really want at #1, especially as it is so close. A lot of people don't bother listing our school as they'd rather place the priority on a stronger chance of one that works reasonably well for them. It's known that there's a latent desire for the school in the surrounding areas beyond the slice of catchment, but it's hard to quantify because of the way people prioritise places.

Siblings in catchment should have priority but siblings outside the catchment area come after the general catchment kids.

Yes this would seem fairest. I think it’s how it happens here (Scotland)

I have again seen a load of kids at my local train station getting the train to go to a school here, coming from both directions so living at least a few miles away from the school. I’m talking 30 kids getting off one train alone. I live 0.5 miles away but couldn’t get my kids in - “faith school”. It’s really disgraceful.

Siblings in catchment should have priority but siblings outside the catchment area come after the general catchment kids.

Agreed, but that seems to be largely what OP's school has - she said that the criteria were:

"Looked after children
Children with special needs (currently 6 at the nursery apparently)
Children with siblings less than 800m away who haven't moved since Sept 16
Catchment children
Siblings out of catchment"

Are there really going to be twenty-four siblings who meet criterion 3?

My friend lives 10m away from her nearest school. They are literally the closest house. But it's a Catholic school so her children can't attend, even though children from across the city can.

There is a lot of this thing around.

YANBU at all. We had the same situation. We live in a very rural part of Kent and two years before DS was due to start school they built a huge new estate (1500 homes) 1.5 miles from our tiny village school. They didn't however build any new school facilities. Our village school is opposite my house but because the village is tiny they only take 10 children a year and Kent rules mean that sibling priority has resulted in every child in the village having to go to schools a minimum of 2 miles from home because every place is taken up by children from the new estate. Because of the rural location there is no bus route and no pavements so every morning and afternoon the village is taken over by parents cars and there have been several accidents caused by bad parking on the very narrow road which was never designed to take that much traffic. The situation has totally fragmented the village as all the local children are driven out of it to go to school while children from the new village are driven in.

Sunset that sounds like some seriously bad planning on the part of your LA. Assume it will all sort itself out in time, when siblings pass through and children are once again accepted on distance.

Sunset that is terrible! I'm sorry :( is there any chance on a waiting list for you or is there little movement?

At a parents social last week a mum said she would just get her youngest in in September then was planning to move out a week later because 'it just costs too much to live here'! Not technically breaking any rules as he is a sibling and they will be living there when the offer is given but it's a bit of a kick in the teeth for those of us who have bought a property years before.

sunset I think we may live in the same village! It's bloody ridiculous, we then get priority in the next village and the kids in that village have to go to the next one along. It's just an absolute shit show which results in absolutely everyone having to drive their kids.

The best part is that there has just been approval for another 50 homes to be built near the station. The school is completely blocked in on all side with no playground at all so no space to expand. The school sent out a message telling us not to worry as they were looking into building a separate junior school on some land a couple of roads along from the current school. Except they hadn't looked into it very hard at all. I own that land, no one has even asked if they could look round it and it has a pretty watertight no build covenant on it.

Years ago when I was little my parents applied for the local primary school and that was it.

And if they couldn't get into the local primary school what would they have done ohsoggy

1970s RC school... all RC kids just sent to nearest RC school. I had 38-40 kids in my class as a norm. One teacher. No TA.
School on estate was similar... if non faith, you just went to local school, as the 30 per class rule hadn't landed.

In Australia priority is given to those closest to the school, other schools do not have to accept you if you are not in their catchment area, second priority is siblings

OhSoggyBiscuit - same here, but that was before maximum class sizes, so I went to my local catchement school with 40 children in the class.

This is the problem, in previous generations, baby booms meant bigger class sizes, reduced numbers of babies meant smaller class sizes. Now, baby booms need additionally classrooms built, or even additional schools if the school site can't get bigger. When class sizes fall in some areas for a number of years, schools close.

Our town has suffered from the private school fees rising over the last 10-15 years, which has priced out a lot of middle class people, including us. People who held DHs job title a generation ago would most likely be privately educating, it's just not affordable for our family now (I'm a SAHM, but even if I was working, we still wouldn't be able to confortably private educate at primary, and certainly not at all at secondary level). This means the state has to accomodate a lot more children than they would have had to bother with a generation back.

We moved house because of this

I’m glad our la has scrapped the siblings rule. Why should we have to go out of our way to drop DS at school miles away where he would have no local friends? Send your kids to a school where both are likely to get in and don’t move between adnittances if it’s that important to you.

Update: only two non siblings got in which I find quite maddening! In a class of 30 there are 24 siblings and 4 children with special needs, again seems high for such a small intake. How can it be that people 100m away are number 10 on a waiting list?!

Sunset that sounds like some seriously bad planning on the part of your LA.

It's one of the idiocies caused by having 2 tiers of local government in "shire counties", Barbarian.

The district council gives planning permission for 1,500 houses, the county council fails to expand the schools to fit the increased population. They may even need DFE approval to do this, they certainly do to build a new school.

SE news had a story the other night about people forced to send primary age kids to schools 6 miles away, because a big housing estate had been built on the edge of town. They couldn't get their kids into any of the schools in the town, I think there were 3 or 4 primaries.

It's happening where I live too. The LEA added a "bulge class" to a school on one edge of town a few years ago, rather than add a few children above PAN to each of the 5 schools. All the siblings of the "bulge class" kids are now schlepping across town to that school, while loads of new houses have been built close by (literally adjoining the school site, in many cases) and the people who have moved in are schlepping their kids across town in the opposite direction.

God knows how many extra car journeys that blindingly brilliant bit of joined-up thinking has caused. The whole bloody town is gridlocked for 30 minutes twice a day, as they all crawl round the one-way system.

It's bonkers and I feel really sorry for parents.