Why do people torment themselves over school places

[Schoolplacechoicemyth]

Im in a local toddler/child social media group.

Every single year there are people on the group who apply wildly optimistically for 2 or 3 oversubscribed schools several miles away from their home, are given the unpopular school they live near and desperately ask how to appeal because they "really love oversubcribed school and absolutely want DC to go there".

They seem completely unprepared for how unlikely it was they'd get a place, baffled that their preference doesn't actually get them the place at the oversubscribed chool, spend weeks/months appealing for schools they have next to no chance of a space at, & complain repeatedly on the group about it. Often the school they live near is fine, its just not the fashionable choice this week.

The local council publish all the info. You can see, easily, how close you need to live to stand a decent chance at a place. All the admission criteria are available.

Why do people do this to themselves!? Do they really think their preference is a factor when applying to a routinely oversubscribed school living miles away? Its like there's some sense of entitlement to a place at the trendy/popular school. I just couldn't torture myself like this. One lady has spent weeks telling her DC they are going to popular school X with their nursery friends. She lives over 5 miles from it & it hasn't taken a non sibling from more than a mile away in over a decade and yet she's bewildered her DC didn't get a space.

If you want to get into an oversubscribed school you need to live very near it. So people either pay to live in good school areas or pay to send to private school. The rest get what they are given....and yes, not everyone is happy about that!

It's weird where I am because the criteria for the local high school has higher priority for those at certain feeder primaries.

Half of these primaries have now formed an academy trust to cement this relationship with the high school. So if you are in one of these primaries you get first priority, then if you are in other feeders you get second priority then it goes to distance. But because there has been a low birth rate and house prices have priced out families, some of the academy primaries are getting a situation where kids from 11miles away are getting spaces and then will almost automatically get a space at the local high, yet kids who maybe move to the area between reception and yr6 and don't get a space at the right primary can be living in the closest house to the high school and not get in. It means the pushy parents from low income areas outside area and the borough get an opportunity there.

It's kinda bonkers in its own right though. There isn't a pressure on the primaries here for spaces in reception as a result, but pressure for the high school is exceeds supply substantially and it gets a really high number of appeals every year. They haven't got to the distance criteria for the last few years for admissions, so you really have to know your way away the system from early on.

It does mean you can't just move to the area for a place though at present. You have to have a commitment to the local school community for a number of years instead. I know parents who took their kids out of school for bullying or cos the primary wasn't matching needs and then found they were up shit creek for high school too.

DS is in a situation where he is almost guaranteed a space with the vast majority of his friends, if we choose the school unlike in a lot of areas as a result.

We live in Scotland and as others have said the system is different, and a lot less stressful here. Kids go to the catchment school, then on to the high school which it feeds into. There are class size limits which increase with age, for example I think Primary 1 is 25, then it's 30, then 33 as they move through the school. If there are lots of kids starting P1 they recruit more teachers. Composite classes combining year groups are common to accommodate overspill. DS' school built an extension with 8 new classrooms due to demand created by new build houses increasing the local population. The house builders funded this as a planning approval condition. If there's no room, or money, to recruit or expand a school the council redraw the catchment area boundaries. This happened close to us so kids living two streets away starting school now go to a school 2 miles away that has capacity. This was awful for people who moved to the affected streets thinking it would be lovely for the kids to walk to school and live near their friends. Some sold and moved up the road closer to the local school.

I think one of the biggest differences is that schools aren't Offsted rated in Scotland. High school exam performance is published each year which drives demand to be in the catchment for the ones that perform well, but not in the same way as the ratings system seems to in England.

People want the best for their children and a school in an area a mile or 2 away may have better performance ratings, a full fun and functioning pta which has activities for children to take place in, and better opportunities.

People shouldn't be laughed at for been upset about their child's school placement when it isn't what they wanted.

What should happen is lea and council should look at why certain schools are not popular and work with them to make it an appealing choice for kids and parents.

The Scottish system provides more certainty for parents, but this comes at a cost for the schools. It can't be easy to manage a school when you have to rearrange class compositions and school layout each year because of varying numbers of children. It's not as simple as just adding a bulge class to reception year - that class isn't going to be full (unless you have literally double the expected number of children in catchment), and it's not going to do anything for the school budget to have, say, 34 children split into two underfilled classes.

Local authorities in England can adapt to demographic trends because they have a base of schools to spread the load between, so they only need to ensure there are enough overall spaces. Whereas in Scotland they have to ensure that each individual school has sufficient space, and other schools can't relieve the pressure on another local school that has too many pupils - the only available immediate response is to bring in more Portacabins.

I've just learnt that my local area decided to abolish catchment areas in September. Priority for secondary school places now has proximity to the school at the bottom of the list, far below attending a feeder school.

I live on the border between two areas. DD goes to a school in the neighbouring area as my nearest school is terrible and the next nearest ones are so oversubscribed that she wouldn't have got in.

The consequence of this is that DD will not get a secondary school place in the city we live in, unless she travels 3.5 miles to the other side of the city to a rough secondary school.

I can't afford to move house or pay for a private education, so this will be in the back of my mind for the next few years.

I moved out of Glasgow to the suburbs of East Renfrewshire where the schools are very highly rated and houses are very expensive
My 3 all did very well
They might have done ok anyway,but I was not prepared to risk it
Most of my friends did the same but

That might be how it has worked out though probably the real reason is because looked after children are more likely than others to have moved between allocation and starting school. And the move would be very likely to have been anticipated.

^Interesting. I was going to ask about that - the Scottish system, especially in cities, seems to be very likely to entrench advantage for the rich living in better areas (therefore better catchments and better schools) and, critically, disadvantage for poor families living in poor catchments.

Wouldn't that be much the same as in England where they operate on the shortest waking distance from the school. Then there are other schools with their own esoteric over-subscription criteria and families that fall between two stools. The main advantage of the Scottish system is that there are no ‘black holes’. You may not get the most desirable school but you won’t be allocated an unpopular school miles away from where you live.