Late Grammar School offer: over the moon but stressed/flummoxed

[PermaShattered]

What a 3 days we've had - any insightful comments welcome. In short:

1. Our daughter was offered 3rd choice (her 11+ score was about 30 down on passmark);
2. 3rd school is outstanding but we appealed to 2nd choice school as was our preference;
3. Last Friday took calls from our local Ed admissions authority saying why appealed when have offer from grammar school?
4. Said we hadn't. She made further calls to other relevant admissions authority and came back and told us we definitely have an offer and it would be in post next day (Saturday just gone);
5. It duly arrived, and we posted our acceptance same day (they should have got it today) - verbal acceptance of place given by phone on Friday;
6. On Friday the Authority also withdrew both our place at 3rd choice school and our appeal to 2nd choice school;
7. Today i take a call from a friend whose daughter got substantially higher score than my DD - and she is 188 on waiting list;
8. I call our admissions auth to check they received our acceptance (they said still in posttray but will be dealt with this afternoon);
9. I query whether there could possibly an error and i'm told categorically 'no'. And if there was, we have a written offer, accepted it and they can't take it off our daughter;

10. Finally, my other DS is that grammar school.

I'm perplexed. What could be a possible explanation?

The appeals panel said that there was no maladministration. There clearly was, says others. But has there been maladministration in the legal sense?

On Allocation Day Perma was told that she had been allocated her 3rd choice. Fine so far. She was later mistakenly told she had a place at her 1st choice.

Is it maladministration in the legal sense if Perma's allocation was correctly dealt with in the first place but a cock up crept in at a latter date?

Yellowtip as a general point would you accept that if her child had been offered a place and the 'mistake' had been identified 2 years after admission (september 2015), she should still retain the place?

If so, when would you make the cut-off? one year after admission(september 2014)?, by start date (september 13)?, 2 weeks before start? other date?

Strange set of questions carol. Yellowtip doesn't think that 7 days is that big a deal (neither do I) so lets see where she stands on 2 years???

In anycase, I don't think the 3 days/7 days thing is relevant anymore.

The appeals panel has decided that no maladministration was involved. This seems to suggest that the line was drawn when Perma was correctly told on allocation day that she got her 3rd choice and anything that happened thereafter came under 'cockup' as to opposed to 'maladministration'

Leave the GS issue out, suppose it was a mistake about distance and it was your child, Habba. At what stage would you have thought it was reasonable to say sorry, we made a mistake?

IMO it would have been reasonable before any movement on waiting lists/appeals happened, so that the child could still be allocated the school they should originally been awarded, so that would be some time by about mid April. However, the LGA decided three days.

(I would still have been annoyed because even before six weeks you could easily have gone out and bought uniform, or bought your child a bike to get to school, or whatever.)

Yes of course that is maladministration. The fact they got it right before they got it wrong is irrelevant legally. They offered a place that should not have been offered. That is maladministration. They then withdrew the offer illegally. That is also maladministration. Any kind of cockup is maladministration. There is no distinction in law. The appeal panel's decision that there was no maladministration is clearly at odds with the facts of the case.

Why do I get the feeling that whatever I say about my general thoughts about the issue, it is going to be used to bash me over the head with regards to Perma?

I don't think that within those 7 days Perma went out to buy the uniform or a bike for DD to ride to school etc. And even if she did, stores have been known to offer refunds. So unless her DD has been spending those 7 days wearing her new uniform ........

There is no false indignation here. This is a serious matter and you are talking about home teams as if it's a football match

There are no self-proclaimed experts here, either. prh47bridge is a well established expert, tiggytape has never, to my knowledge, declared his/herself to be an expert, lavolcan has clearly said that he/she is not an expert and I have stated that I am not an expert many times to Perma, but as it happens I received notification that I have been accepted onto the appeals panel yesterday.

The admissions appeals code does not define a point in time when a mistake is an acceptable 'cock-up'. The LGO gives 24 hours as 'acceptable' and 3 days as 'unacceptable' so 1 or 2 days is possibly ok. I would think that it gives more weight, not less, that the news came by personal notification, followed up in writing, rather than simply a rogue letter amongst a huge batch on allocations day.

habba I'm sure she didn't go out to buy uniform or a bike, because they were making an appeal for the 2nd choice.

I specifically asked you, because you don't think seven days is unreasonable, but at some stage someone has to decide what is reasonable. I know that I would have been furious if I suddenly found on 31st August that the allocated place was withdrawn, and no, an appeal to my second and third choice was no good, because their places were filled in June, so I then had to accept the school 10 miles away in special measures because that was all that could be found.

I love your 'clearly at odds with the facts of the case' comment Those stupid incompetents on the AP, eh? If only they had your grasp of the law they would see a clear cut case of maladministration.

Looking back at the early posts, there were no shortage of posters telling Perma that she had an airtight case in her appeal. The AP didn't agree. There is still no shortage of posters telling Perma she has an airtight case in her appeal to the appeal.

Sorry but given your record with regards to the first appeal, I'm not putting any faith in your prognostications for the appeal of the appeal.

But you still haven't answered my question about what you would think is a reasonable date to withdraw the offer! (Not that anyone is going to ask either of us, but you could say that we represent the person on the Clapham Omnibus.)

Don't forget that Perma's LA told her they couldn't take the place away.

9. I query whether there could possibly an error and i'm told categorically 'no'. And if there was, we have a written offer, accepted it and they can't take it off our daughter;

Perma had her offer withdrawn 7 days later. She could have gone - worth a shot now let's get back to my original plan and appeal for choice number 2 but she didn't.

Instead, fuelled by the 'airtight case' lobby, she pushed ahead thinking that it was a slam dunk and lost the appeal. Now people seem to be arguing that because she had been inconvenienced for two months she should have won her appeal. By that logic, everyone who appeal and loses should get a place because of the inconvenience.

Ah yes, but now she is being faced with all these inconveniences. Perma should fight to get her DD a place at the GS even at this late stage. Fight to get a place at choice 2? Too disruptive . I don't see the difference.

The person at the LA was correct and went as far as to put it in writing.

If panels never got it wrong and were never badly trained and were never unbiased, the LGO wouldn't have any cases to report. Yet, there are dozens of cases where errors are made, panels are poorly trained, our biased in favour of the school in question.

Ever heard of 'two wrongs don't make a right'?

And the fact that the LA told her that they couldn't take the place away had no bearing on it? They are supposed to be the experts as far as admissions go.

I suspect that if there hadn't been another authority involved it wouldn't have come to this - her own LA would ruefully have accepted they had made the mistake, and someone in Educational Admin would have had their knuckles rapped severly.

carol if after two years the mistake was discovered and this child has extraordinarily managed perhaps not to flourish but at least to keep up without struggling, then of course the child should remain. It was seven days though, not two years.

Is that in 'justice according to Yellowtip'??

The real answer is that the Code explicitly states that a place must not be removed once a child starts at a school unless the place was obtained fraudulently.

Not everybody accepts their places, some apply when they have done the 11+ for other grammar schools as well. Then the places get offered to people who just missed out - a friend of mine has grammar schools in her area (none here) and her son was 20 or so outside the top 200 children who got offered places. They got a letter in July offering a place, though they turned it down

On the maladministration question, this is pure speculation but I wonder if the panel made the same mistake as I've seen made by some other appeal panels.

Far too regularly I assist with appeals where the parents have applied to their home LA for a place in a school at a neighbouring LA but they've missed out because their home LA failed to pass on the application. More rarely I deal with cases where the home LA has failed to pass an application on to a VA school or academy within the LA. The number of such cases I've dealt with is well into double figures. The parents have won every single case to date but quite a few of them have had to go to the LGO to get it sorted. Some appeal panels have looked simply at the question of whether or not there was a mistake by the admission authority (i.e. the school for a VA school or academy, the school's LA for other schools), decided there wasn't and therefore upheld the decision to refuse admission without looking any wider. The LGO has always been clear in such cases that the appeal panel must look at the whole process when deciding if the child has been deprived of a place in error and has therefore upheld those appeals that have been rejected by appeal panels.

So, looking at this case, it may be that the appeal panel decided that the school got it right but the mistake was made by one of the two LAs and therefore, in their view, didn't count. That is, however, speculation. Without seeing the clerk's notes it is impossible to be sure. But if that was the basis of their decision they were clearly wrong.

Perma - To give you some advice (which is, after all, the point!)...

When a case is referred to the LGO (I know this one is going to the EFA but read on) the normal outcome if they find that there were problems with the appeal is that they recommend a fresh hearing with a different panel. They will only normally recommend that the child is admitted without a further hearing if they conclude that there is only one possible outcome from a correctly conducted appeal.

We don't have much history to go on with the EFA so it is difficult to judge what they will do, but I know there have been a lot of discussions between the EFA and the LGO in an attempt to ensure that they work to common standards. I would therefore approach this the same way I would approach the LGO. I would write to the EFA (or write again if you have already done so!) setting out the sequence of events and pointing out any issues with the way the hearing was conducted and the obvious problems with the decision. I would then quote LGO case 99C01876 and state that the decision in this case has always been understood to mean that an offer made in error cannot be withdrawn more than 3 days after it was made and that therefore a correctly conducted appeal should result in the place being reinstated. I would ask the EFA in light of this to recommend that your daughter is admitted without the need for a further appeal.

lougle I'm quite sure that the LAs get it wrong at least as many times as APs!

I think the Bishop Vesey case has prompted a serious smartening up of AP training/ independence etc. in relation to grammars. We are now several appeals sessions beyond Vesey.

The LA agree with Perma. They are the experts so they must know what they are talking about.

The AP, who are also experts, don't agree so they are obviously a bunch of incompetents???

No it's in 'Let's Take A Raincheck on Reality' by Yellowtip.

The point is that the test evidence suggests that a grammar education is not appropriate for this child. She was 30 marks off. In grammar terms that's spectacular really.

prh47bridge, the efa site implies a more limited scope than lgo. Is this just brevity, or is it a policy difference?:

10. Where the EFA finds evidence that incorrect or unreasonable action or failure to comply has, or may have, caused an injustice, it can require that a new appeal is heard by a fresh panel. However it cannot substitute its own view of the facts for those of the original admission appeal panel, or overturn the panel?s decision.

They'll also only hear within 6 months rather than 12.

appeals panels are not experts by definition. They can only go by the information given to them and the legal guidance offered. If the clerk doors not give them the right information, they can't make the right decision.

"A panel must consist of the following persons with at least one from each category: a) lay people (someone without personal experience in the management of any school or provision of education in any school (except as a school governor or in another voluntary capacity));
b)people who have experience in education, who are acquainted with educational conditions in the local authority area, or who are parents of registered pupils at school