To get annoyed about people moaning about school allocations ?

[Yukbuck]

Not sure if something similar has been written about so apologies if it has.
I'm on a lot of local facebook groups and people have been moaning all week about how to appeal school choices etc... because they haven't gotten in to their preferred choice, yet their preferred choice is like 3 schools away and if you look at catchment areas they were never in it for the last few years anyway. I don't understand why people moan about it and expect to be able to appeal and be randomly offered places. Where do they suppose these places magicly come from? Schools are a certain size and they can't physically grow. People know that in order to get into a certain school then you need to be within the catchment so moaning about it won't change anything? I understand things change and move around so going on the waiting list but seriously I saw someone suggesting to film their child walking to school to show how physically draining it was for them to walk to school because it was too far .. some of these suggestions are ridiculous!

Totally. I understand people wanting to apply but always put your closest school as a backup just in case you don’t get it

I agree with you to a certain extent. However, in my defence I considered schools when I moved to mine 10 years ago and was happy with the local catchment school.
When I went to apply this year for my 4 year old, I find out that about 2 years ago they redrew the boundaries and now we were in a poor school area. I didn’t have time to move even if I wanted too. Luckily I got my first choice, but I would have felt annoyed and appealed for the sake of it, if I hadn’t.

YANBU.

Although the whole 'choice' palaver is the unreasonable bit if you ask me. It gives people unreasonable expectations. Then they aren't fulfilled and people naturally moan.

Mums at my DS nursery were having kittens that their children wouldn't get into a particular school - we live in a very nice area of Birmingham with several good/outstanding primaries. But the whole options procedure puts people on edge and makes them frantic.

Yabu to an extent but it depends on context. We put our "nearest" school down as first choice (less than a mile) but we aren't in catchment. This particular school has an odd catchment so children who live 5 miles away fall into into its catchment but we don't. We ended up with a school we have to drive past our nearest school to get to. It's ridiculous.

So it depends on circumstances and school places are such a worry to those where it's not straight forward. We only just got into my dc's catchment infant school years ago because of the rising population and many that lived within catchment but further out were allocated schools much further away.