To say that the English system of school allocations seems bonkers?

[Edinburghgirlie]

I have been reading with interest the threads about school placements and potential appeals and find it bonkers. Here in Scotland you live in a catchment area and you automatically get a space at that school...no question. If you want to go to another school then you put in a placing request and if they have spaces unfillled by catchment children then they consider siblings already there and proximity to the school.
It’s very clear cut here, although it does lead to house prices being pushed up if they are in the catchment of a ‘desirable’ school. I really don’t envy people down south not knowing which school they will get in to.
AIBU in thinking the English system seems bonkers?

user1488397844
Is one catchment school an RC school and the other non-dom?

Edinburghgirlie
If we used that system in England I would have been allocated (what I consider) an awful local school, as it was closest and not to mention religious. Couldn't afford to move house but was able to put 3 good (nominally secular) schools down as our preference and got one of them. So happy we didn't have to go to our 'local' school.

If I had had the money we could have moved and got an excellent school, but cant have it all.

It's mostly catchment where we are. We are very rural. But increasingly it's getting harder.
When DD started at her school (she's now in Year 4) there were 2 classes, in two classrooms.
The children that left last year (so 3 years older than DD) had only 4 kids in their year. DD was part of the biggest intake they'd ever had - 14 kids. Which is now standard. Still small, but clearly you can't put Years 3 to 6 into one class and one classroom like they used to. What caused this?
Most of our villages are tiny. One street with outlying houses, mostly on farms. There is one big one, not quite big enough for a town, but it has a chemist, post office, local shop (no doctors or dentist though) etc. And a school. Right in the middle. They have built 2 new housing estates on the edge of the village in the last 5 years. Family friendly. Families have moved in. Surprise surprise, the kids need to go to school. Only the school hasn't expanded, it can't, there isn't anywhere to expand into. So people putting this as their first choice, even if they live in catchment, might not get it. There simply isn't space owing to the complete lack of joined up thinking about housing, the people you want to live in these houses and the other facilities they may need.
So several of the children in DD's class come from this village. Which means our school has expanded. We now have four classes. They have built into the attic to make one extra classroom, and taken away a chunk of playground to make a second extra one. There is now nowhere else to go, unless we leave the kids with no outside space at all (there is space around the village but as the school is in the middle - church behind, road in front, farm opposite - unless you plan on buying land away down the road and walking the kids backwards and forwards...). So it is plausible that in a few years time either all kids from Big Village go miles and miles away, past our village, to another school. Or kids from Big Village go to our school, a few miles away from where they live, while kids from our village then travel a few miles again, to the other school.
Does that make sense? So far, no-one has been turned away from our school. But we are coming to the end of the tiny year groups as my DDs lot, the start of the bigger intakes, progress up the school. If any houses go up around us (and they are saying we need to build a certain number - rules handed down from county - what happens then?
It's not a deliberately crazy system I don't think. It was originally, and should still be, based on catchment. It's just the way other things have happened around it (mainly house building) to create crazy situations.

No both non-denominational schools. We also have a RC school but need baptismal certificate to even apply. (No problem for us as we aren't religious so wouldn't try to send her there anyway although admittedly it is a fantastic school)

user1488397844
That’s interesting. In Edinburgh each area only has one non-dom catchment school and one RC. Good luck getting your place!

That's the point though - that in areas where there's rapid house building (using Dunfermline as an example) - the schools can't cope, the council are already talking about having to rezone the high school catchments to see how they can best distribute the children. While simultaneously approving new housing developments with no new schools being built.

In smaller towns where there's less housebuilding it's not a problem. They just seem to go through their natural life cycle, and generally operate under capacity, with the odd baby-boom year where they have to make a composite class. My year group at primary only had 18 of us, so we were always in a composite class with 4 of the younger children from the year above us. Generally, people tend to just send their kid to their catchment school (non-denominational or Catholic), or there aren't so many placing requests that the school can't cope with because they're done for reasons like disability provision, proximity to younger siblings nursery etc. rather than there being a pecking order of how good a school is.

Do you think the 'everyone goes to the local school' system is connected to why educational attainment in Scotland has been going downhill compared to England?

walkingdeadfangirl
No, I think that’s because of the shambles that is Curriculum for Excellence!

shambles that is Curriculum for Excellence! I guess that is for another thread lol

No, because none of them are any better than others. I'd say it's more down to the Curriculum for Excellence and the new qualifications.

Attainment in Scotland has been going down, but I thought it was now sitting close to equal with England, eg ranking in the mid-twenties in the Pisa rankings?

And yes to curriculum for excellence, the nonsense that is named person and generally expecting teachers to do to much non-teaching activity.

I think there is a dual catchment in Edinburgh isn't there, for part of gracemount/liberton? Very very unusual though, the catchment areas are normally non overlapping for non denom, and similar for RC.

You do hear of rare occasions where something unusual happens, like a pp described in Dunfermline, but they are rare and usually short lived as they will then tend to look at redrawing the boundaries.

Our school has gone from being threatened with closure in 2006 due to being undersubscribed, to having it's boundaries redrawn, to being full, to having new classrooms built to make space. For the last couple of years we've had composite classes and team teaching so nobody from catchment has been turned away.

This is central Edinburgh btw

And yes to CfE being a bag of absolute wank!

Yes, the pastoral care in particular, at primary level is excellent. And poor behaviour is simply not tolerated, very much a firm but fair approach, whereas in the English schools we were in the badly behaved children got away with murder - actually make that the children AND the parents! Lots of minimising and excuses!

But there's also clearly communicated boundaries on expected behaviour anyway so it's rare that extreme bad behaviour even happens, low level bad behaviour is dealt with early on in a variety of ways.

This is absolute nonsense...

I think that Scottish people often don't 'get' how densely packed big cities can be and how much movement there is. I think the English system is bit bananas from its representation on MN but I quite admire the idea of people having a choice.

StatisticallyChallenged
Absolute bag of wank...lol
I didn’t know that about Liberton/Gracemount- I’m not on that side of town.

Same in Australia OP...but there aren't as many people here. That's all there is to it.

Bangingmyhead: what child fits a school with mediocre teaching?

Yanbu, I always think the English system sounds horrendously stressful when I read threads on here at application time. There is the odd anomaly in Scotland but at least most people have some certainty.

I was talking to a teacher friend who said that they’re head recently stood up in front of the staff and said they would be ignoring the curriculum for excellence from now on as it is a load of shite.

*their not they’re ffs!!!

It sounds like the biggest issue with the English system is that the catchment areas aren't properly aligned - there's gaps and overlaps in some places - so for some people there is no guaranteed school. That doesn't really happen here unless there's a mega screw up somewhere.

The issue with the only school often being a faith school is tricky too.

I'm in Scotland and much prefer the Scottish system to the English one.

The "70 extra children suddenly registering" scenario just doesn't happen on a regular basis. Whether it's because there is better information sharing between government bodies or whether it's because the population is more stable in Scotland I don't know, but we just do not have the same issues with huge demand on school places. In situations where the school would ideally take 50 into P1 and they have 60 within catchment, they juggle things around, stick a portacabin in the playground, build an extension. But it's really not an issue in most areas.

Placing requests - you don't have to have a reason for opting for a school other than your catchment one other than wanting to. Each local authority has its own way of deciding their criteria for who gets in if there are more placing request applications than there are spaces - usually looked after children, siblings, then distance from school and still within the same local authority, then distance irrespective of local authority. This is all set out on Council websites.

To me, the major advantage is the certainty. Our house is in the catchment for a specific primary school, which feeds into the nearest secondary school. My eldest was 4 when we moved in. We had the certainty of knowing exactly where he'd be for Primary and Secondary, and where the others would go too. Yes the house prices are higher because we're in catchment for excellent schools, but house prices in many parts of the south east are much, much higher and you aren't guaranteed anything! We don't have the stress of waiting for your allocation, siblings in differnet schools, appeals and so on.

I think parental choice as a way of allocating places is completely incompatible with a decent school system...

It’s applying consumer choices to something that it just can’t work with, there are no better performing schools waiting to take the pupils from poor performing schools, so all you end up with is a system that redustributes pupils.

I live in an area (not in the UK) that has defined catchments for schools. Virtually everyone goes to their local school, and they adjust class sizes to cope. At the beginning of the year it is slightly chaotic as it takes a couple of days for the schools to figure out how many children they will have in each year and so how many teachers/ classrooms they need. Every now and then they juggle the catchments and a cohort of children change schools all together. All the schools in our town are fairly similar, and as they are run by the same school board which also operates the pool of supply teachers and contracts for all the school buses it all works relatively smoothly. Sometimes they get the juggling a bit wrong and a school might have excess capacity or be a bit crowded (eg my children's secondary had five portacabin classrooms at one point) but that seems to be a feature in England too.

What is the system for 'placing request', who decides if you get it, is it independent, can you appeal it, can you do as many as you want to several schools, can you go on a waiting list to change if a place comes up. Are you allowed to home school while you wait for a good school place to come up? Are you allowed to rent, get place and move...

The Council decides. School has nothing to do with it. All parents of children starting school this August will have registered their kids in January and submitted placing requests at that time. Usually it's around May that numbers are finalised and parents are told the outcome. If they are unsuccessful, they still have their place at their catchment school. You can appeal a placing request refusal but you'd need exceptional circumstances. Yes you can go on a waiting list if you wish to do so, but depending on the area there may be little movement. You can homeschool if you like but there's no guarantee of how long you'd wait for a place. You need to show council tax bills when registering for school - very popular schools KNOW that space is at a premium and are cracking down on people giving granny's address or renting with no intention of living there. As far as I know you can only put in one placing request per local authority but I've never done it so could be wrong on that.