So upset at school offer

[kathjee]

Actually sat here crying, sounds so silly. But DS got his third choice, which I was never keen on and is far away.

All his friends got 1st choice and so happy and messaging in the watsapp grp. He's going to be gutted when he gets home from school.

I know we can appeal but iv also heard they are rarely successful. Can anyone help or advise re appeals pls? I feel like we always have such bad luck in these things, without sounding cliche it does always seem to be us who don't get first choices etc 😭.

Yeah well aware how it works but couldn’t see the point putting one on I wasn’t happy with and then could appeal if needed…

Hi - school stuff is so tricky.
assuming this is state school and not Private.
my daughter didn’t get any of her 6 choices and got one miles away.
we went on wait list immediately on preferred school… and then rang and showed an interest, explained we were very keen.
then kept in contact.
Once the kids going to private school accept their places in private schools and release their state school places this frees up.
good luck - and also - and I know you know this - but try not to look to sad for your son… in case he has to go there. Even if he only goes for a term. Also LOTs of kids move school end of year 7 and year 8.
wishing you lots of luck @kathjee

Yeah well aware how it works but what’s the point in adding one that I wouldn’t be happy with… would rather just appeal

Thia is one of the admission criteria in Surrey schools. I believe it replaces the idea of a catchment.

You can appeal either way, but the appeal might fail.

Better to be at a school you don’t want 3 miles away than one 10 miles away if your appeal is unsuccessful

@ALJT but what if appeals/ waiting lists don't work? Unless you're happy to home school they have to go somewhere.

No advice OP as I see others have given good responses....just to say I'm so sorry, you are not unreasonable at all to feel gutted. We've just viewed a house that's well out of our budget because we're trying to move to get into the catchment area (our only choice here is awful). I hate having to do it and there are no guarantees. I really hope you get the best outcome for your DS.

Yes, this. You need a ‘banker’. Because it’s better to have a school you don’t want that is at least local, rather than a school you don’t want that is also miles away. Unless you’re willing to homeschool indefinitely (and I do mean indefinitely!)

How the admissions process usually works:

The schools have a list of criteria, in priority order.

They rank all applicants according to those criteria. They have an ordering sub criteria which is often straight line distance to the school.

Where a child can be offered a place a multiple schools the LA accepts the one with the highest preference and then removes them from the list at lower preference schools, then checks the first child on the waitlist at the lower schools to see if they had 2 offers now. Once all movement stops you have the lists for offers day.

Everyone receives their offers, you have to accept or decline fairly quickly. Most schools also publish a list at this point of how many places in each criteria were offered and what the distance was if they were oversubscribed.

SUPER IMPORTANT - accept your place unless you would rather homeschool than go to that school, it has no impact on the wait list

A couple of weeks after the deadline, second offers day. This is when late applicants get added to the mix, basically everyone who rejects their offer on offers day has their place offered to the next person on the list.

Then waitlists start on a one out one in basis. There will be movement all through the summer, there will be movement all through the first year. If you get past the transition day have a long think about if you got offered a move would you take it, when your number comes up you will not have much time.

It's incredibly difficult to win an appeal, unless there has been an error. Social and medical grounds sounds nice, but realistically you need a doctors or social workers report naming the school and stating the harm to even stand a chance.

And don't give up. I got offered a place at my preferred school last week, and there were 3 other new students coming in at the start of this half term. Sure he's missed a term and a half of learning, but he's still got 6 and a half years to go!

OP you’ve had a mixed bag of advice here but I would listen to @prh47bridge who is an expert. I work in a secondary and can assure you there will be plenty of movement in the next few weeks and the waiting lists will shuffle upwards as people turn spaces down/move area/go private etc. I would keep up to date with the LEA but not much point ringing the school as some have suggested unless they manage their own admissions. At my school we don’t do our own, and we have no idea who is on our waiting list. Every year we have parents calling in convinced we must be holding back information! Good luck and hope you get some good news soon.

Appeal for what though? People have been caught out where I live as live near borders two LAs (one London/one Surrey) and the Surrey default school is better than the London one yet you only get Surrey if that is your LA even if you are a 30 minute walk away.
and the London one is a lot further away

It's not just distance from the school there's also other factors like siblings EHCPs etc.
Also it's the distance at the crow flies to the school reception; we missed out on a place by one person we were closer to the actual school building due to its shape and the position on the school grounds but they were closer to the main entrance and school reception.

It is so so tiring reading comments with UTTERLY incorrect advice about 'first preferences first'. @prh47bridge (and many others) know what they are talking about, do NOT think putting anything first would have mattered.

Just to back it up, here's an excerpt from the School Admissions Code (ie the legal document that states what criteria schools can use):

'First Preference First
Oversubscription criterion that giving priority to children according to the order of other schools named as a preference by their parents, or only considering applications stated as a first preference. The First Preference First oversubscription criterion is prohibited by this Code' (Full doc: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60ebfeb08fa8f50c76838685/School_admissions_code_2021.pdf)

(I worked in school admissions for ten years and the number of misunderstandings! We'd sometimes get eg applications where only one school was listed, but six times, to increase the chance... it doesn't work like that either...)

There's your issue. You should only put a school as first choice if you know you're highly likely to get a place otherwise the second choice school will fill up with first choicers/siblings etc and maybe the 3rd choice school will too, and then you could end up with something really awful or inconvenient. I'm so sorry for you, but hindsight is great/a twat - so the only thing I can say to you is that my eldest sons allocated school was bad - tbf we knew this already and had actually put it down as first choice because the other 2 decent schools in the (very low socio economic) area were either religious and never got down to places given on proximity, or slightly too far away and in a densely populated area so would likely fill up with first choices based on proximity, so the 3rd choice tactic for the bad school was just purely because it was the closest, and if we'd put it as 3rd choice, he wouldn't have got a place there either as it would've been filled by 1st and 2nd choicers, so he would've been allocated somewhere even worse and much further away from home.

Anyway, I digress - the school was deemed as so bad, that his primary school (in a different LA) headteacher phoned me up in a panic and spent an hour and a half begging me not to send him there (like it's that easy to have a choice!). Reputation locally was bad too. But one of our main priorities for secondary school was proximity so my son could make local friends and expand/start again his social life. And we also thought our son is fairly academic so would make the most of any school (turns out we were wrong about this). So we decided to go ahead with a plan of getting a transfer to the first/2nd choice schools as soon as possible. Anyway, in 5 years the school has gone from requires improvement to good, and they have been absolutely amazing in tough circumstances with my son. His ND brother started there in Sept and they've been incredible with him, he's just flying so high already. The 1st choice school is now inadequate and has a terrible reputation locally. My point is, if your kid is going to do well at school, they're going to do well at school. Most schools seem to be in cycles of being decent, to then being shit, to then improving, to being shit again. If your priority is your son going to school with his mates (even though they often don't stay mates) or proximity, then get the ball rolling for waiting lists and keep on at them after he starts his allocated school to get transfered ASAP. If your priority is purely education, maybe give the school a chance - it might turn out to be the best thing that could've happened.

@LT1233 it really really doesn’t work like that

Your son sounds a really lovely young man...
My friend who got her children into a desirable state school {Religious} made sure she was going to Church for a long time in advance..
My son didn't get in to the school we wanted, either, due to catchment areas- {His primary we were in the catchment area for}

The secondary was so ''rough'' that he did get into, that his friends who lived near us who tried it ,were so shocked after the lovely 'outstanding' primary that they went to Independents..

We got son into a much nicer State school a year later.
{He's grown now}

Best wishes with your lovely Boy. 👍

As you have already been told and has been stated many, many times on this thread, school do NOT prioritise people who put them first, so your advice to not put a school first unless you’re confident you’ll get it is completely and utterly wrong. It has been illegal to prioritise based on preference for almost 20 years!

The school have no idea where your preference is that is all confidential. Whether you get a place depends on where you are in terms of their admissions criteria - the system will go through and match up until one of your preferences meets the criteria of the school.

"There's your issue. You should only put a school as first choice if you know you're highly likely to get a place otherwise the second choice school will fill up with first choicers/siblings etc and maybe the 3rd choice school will too, and then you could end up with "

Sorry but this is totally wrong!
Please do not believe this is how admissions work.
All schools have to order all applicants whether 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 6th into a long long list according to the entry criteria, then you are offered the top school you qualify for.

Also appealing at secondary has a lot more chance of success than Infants.
And my son got his first choice from being at least 25th on the list.

@LT1233 in my experience most school staff don’t know how admissions work, I have heard similar from people I work with. There’s a good chance the head teacher he had no idea themselves!

Even if they do, they aren't going to be able to do anything about it until the LA is prepared to make further offers - which, because parents have to be given time before deciding whether to accept or not (and then remind them, then wait, then remind them again, then wait, then tell them if they don't respond the offer will be withdrawn, then wait...) AND they have to liaise with out of borough/area for them to do the same - isn't likely to happen before Easter.

It has been illegal for any school to operate like that since at least 2007.

We had this. We were all devastated. He got the catchment school which we didn’t even put on our form. We went on the waiting list and appealed to both 1st and 2nd choices. Both appeals failed. I only know one person who succeeded in appealing and she was a solicitor so don’t know if she used her legal knowledge.
We were patient and stayed on the waiting lists. 2 weeks after he started at the catchment school we had a call from both 1st and 2nd choices to say they had a space.
We were really unsure about moving him as he’d already started and we’d just paid a fortune for school uniform, but he was really unhappy and unsettled so we took the plunge and moved him to his 1st choice. It was the best decision we ever made. He was a different child and thrived and is now at a top uni.
Apparently kids who go to private schools are automatically allocated a local authority place at school ( in our area anyway) and schools aren’t allowed to remove them until term starts and they don’t turn up!
We were originally 125 on the waiting list and eventually got the place. So if you hold out it may happen. You need to be aware though of the schools admission criteria and if there is a looked after child who needs to go on the waiting list they will go on above you and you could go down the list as well as up.

Apologies for getting it wrong. Have asked for my post to be deleted