Is this admission fraud? AIBU to report it?

[grammarmom]

Here's the situation.

We live in a grammar school catchment area that gets smaller every year. When we bought our house several years ago, it was very comfortably within the catchment for an excellent local grammar (very high in the league tables), and oh boy was it reflected in the price. Now we're right on the boundary. Among the thirty or so houses around us, some children got in last year and some didn't, literally a difference of a few yards.

Another child on our street, who is in the same class as my DC, only just passed the 11+ (a few points above the pass threshold). We live on the same road, but they are about 50 yards further from the school gate. Based on last year's distances, my child would likely get a place while theirs wouldn't.

Over the weekend, during a sleepover, the child mentioned that her mother has now rented a house much closer to the school to secure a higher priority for admission. The tenancy was apparently signed one day before the cut-off date, making it "legal" for admission purposes. She still owns their original home, but the story being presented is that relatives who were previously "homeless" will now live there free of charge, and all bills and utilities have been transferred into those relatives' names (I strongly suspect that the mother will in fact pay these bills as those relatives are penniless).

She's even moved the children's belongings to the rented property and makes them spend nights there (they hate it). There's no doubt that once the school place is obtained, they will move right back.

This effectively pushes my child down the priority list and means they may now miss out.

Would this constitute admissions fraud? It feels incredibly unfair that someone with £40k to spare for rent can effectively buy their way into a top grammar school, especially when their child didn't perform particularly well in the exam (despite being tutored for hours every day).

Should I report this? I have no more detail apart from what this child told me (and they obviously weren't too sure about some aspects of it due to age).

That’s hard, especially as an appeal at 4 would be under class size rules - so the decision not to admit would have had to be unreasonable, which is a high bar - rather than under balance of prejudice, where the harm suffered by the child in not being admitted can be weighed against the harm suffered by the school in admitting over 30 children into 1 class.

Sometimes, a school may really want to admit a child but the rules - made in the interests of the reliability, repeatability and predictability of the system- prevent it.

This is obviously right, as otherwise it could be abused by heads admitting children they ‘like’ and avoiding those thad they don’t (I have been at the receiving end of an informal, pre-application version of this when looking at schools for an in-year transfer and it was horrible), but it can feel unfair.

@TheignT it is sad.

But it does, I think, support the general premise of the posters saying that LAs will stick to the letter of the admissions policies and not take into account "personal/subjective reasons" - no matter how strong or legitimate they are.

Which is why I don't think "rented house out to refugees who had nowhere else to go" would be a winning case.

The Admission Appeals Code makes it clear that the question for the appeal panel is not whether the admission authority was right. It is whether their decision was ‘beyond the range of responses open to a reasonable decision maker’ or ‘a decision which is so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question could have arrived at it’. This is the same standard that is applied at judicial review and sets a very high bar for parents to get over. So offering evidence that the decision was wrong and the family really is living in the rented property and will continue to do so long term won't, in general, win an appeal.

There are no national statistics on why appeals are won or lost, so I can only go off cases in which I have been involved. Parents have only won in cases of alleged admissions fraud where the decision clearly doesn't stand up to scrutiny (e.g. an LA that tried to take places away from any family that moved after getting a place, arguing that this meant their application must have been fraudulent) or the LA has failed to make reasonable enquiries before making their decision. That doesn't necessarily mean asking the parents for an explanation but, for example, if the house is clearly uninhabitable, the appeal panel is likely to think that the LA should have checked the house was habitable before deciding to use it as the home address.

In a surprising number of cases, parents who try to use a rented property to get a school place actually get it on the basis of their real home address. However, the information available suggests that very few of those who miss out because the LA believes their application was fraudulent appeal against that decision. Around 1,000 children every year have their place taken away after they have started attending the school because the admission authority has concluded that their application was fraudulent or deliberately misleading. Appeals against these decisions are vanishingly rare. That suggests to me that LAs generally get it right.

Yes it does. Although I don't know if all authorities are the same. The parents clearly weren't trying to scam anything as if they were they'd have just paid another weed rent.

I just felt so sorry for the four year old was excited about getting her place like all her friends.

I think my LA is more flexible, one of mine went to grammar school with a girl who took the exam in another country where her father's job had taken them for a year or maybe two. She came home that summer and started grammar school in the September. Not sure if there is a special rule for that.

Weeks rent, not sure what weed rent would be.

I think my LA is more flexible, one of mine went to grammar school with a girl who took the exam in another country where her father's job had taken them for a year or maybe two. She came home that summer and started grammar school in the September. Not sure if there is a special rule for that.

If it was a super selective grammar school, then the list would be held in 'score order' rather than by distance, so her being elsewhere at the time of application wouldn't impact on her ranking for a place.

Yeah, they all differ.

We are a 30 min drive from dds grammar. I thought I had it hard with that commute but there are some parents driving 90 mins to get them to school. Super, super selective girls grammar with no others in the county.

There are different rules for children of employees of the UK government whose work takes the family abroad as an example there. Might not your child's friends case, but some of my DDs sat their 11+ at their school abroad.

I think you are mistaking "fairness" with "consistency".
A rule can be both unfair and consistently applied.
A rule that says "if you rent and own this is automatically viewed as fraud" (which by the way is not even the general rule) would be arbitrary and unfair in the sense that it would include situations within the definition of "fraudulent" that have no meaningful / relevant connection to school admissions fraud. That's why it's not even actually the rule, and to act as if it were is arbitrary.

Awful.

An excellent example of why people should mind their own business and not go around reporting their friends and neighbours for perceived transgressions of arbitrary administrative rules.

Many aspects of our lives are regulated by ‘arbitrary administrative rules’.

Driving on the left, for example. It’s an arbitrary rule, and other countries have a different one. Would it be right to report someone driving on the wrong side of a major road?

Equally anything with a closing or ending date. Is it ok for there to be a closing date for eg an invoice, a job application, or a special offer, or should you be able to buy that item at the reduced price a week later, or apply for that job expecting to be interviewed on another date at your convenience? Or pay an invoice arbitrarily late?

Indeed. An object lesson in why parents need to understand the admissions criteria of any school they are applying to for their children.

Children are entitled to sit the 11+ transfer test for.any grammar school no matter where they live. If they pass and are awarded a place the super-selectives take the view that it is up to the parents to get their child to school; catchment-area grammars have additional distance criteria which have to be met. Every year you get parents saying 'but my super-bright DC scored x,.why hasn't he\she got a place?' And the answer is almost always 'you live too far from the school'.

lol well that would be a matter of life and death, which is also why it would be considered reckless driving which is a criminal offence. So comparable to reporting an arbitrary administrative offence? Nope.

I doubt it will be within the rules, most schools are wise to this and won't consider a rented address if they are also house owners.

I am simply challenging your claim that something being what you call an ‘arbitrary administrative rule’ makes it unimportant.

A rule can be arbitrary, administrative and vitally important - so its arbitrary administrative nature is not a reason that can be used to dismiss it just because you don’t like it.

If you accept that schools admissions are governed by rules (rather than, say, us all showing up at the gate on day 1 with our kid for any school in the country that we fancy) then you must surely accept that some applications will be successful within those rules and some will not.

All the rules about preference in the event of oversubscription 'could' be different than they are (e.g. sibling preference/no sibling preference, church attendance required or not, staff kid preference or not, fixed catchment/nearest distance). All of the distinctions are administrative.

I don't really understand the introduction of the word 'arbitrary' - they are not arbitrary but criteria that are published in advance and which must be in accordance with the Admissions Code (i.e. no saying "kids called John/Jane" or "kids with a blue front door" get preference - now that would be arbitrary!)

And the fact remains, as I said upthread, that parents appealing against the application of these rules on the basis of their being unfair, or arbitrary, or different from other areas/schools, or any other term you care to apply DO NOT WIN. So ultimately the authorities (even up to and including legal authorities on rare occasions) back schools' rights to apply said rules.

People can complain about them all they like, but the case for whether they are reasonable has already been won and lost.

That's thoroughly unnecessary @daleylama

No it wasn't a government job, wasn't even a British company.

No not super selective, the less prestigious grammar in our catchment area but a lovely school. They do select on score in the exam, as far as I remember distance only comes into it after score and siblings.

No not super selective, the less prestigious grammar in our catchment area but a lovely school. They do select on score in the exam, as far as I remember distance only comes into it after score and siblings.