reported false address to LEA

[SpeckledHen]

My ds has not got a place at the local primary school since the school can only take 30 and we are 31st on the list (special needs, siblings and those closer come first). Someone who I know lives far away but has a brother living near the school did get in, claiming that she was living with her brother. I was gutted at my ds not getting a place and reported them. Wrested with my conscience but am compelled through love of ds and desire for him to attend local school. Am I being unreasonable? What will happen and will the LEA tell the family it was me that reported them?

I can see how this is a dilemma. Not sure what I would do but on balance I would probably have informed the school too - if I believed that the other family's dishonesty had effectively taken my child's rightful school place from her.

Just playing devil's advocate here - to what extent can a good school be expanded before it becomes too big? If it expanded to take everyone in a given town would it still be good? Has anywhere in the country been allowed to expand or have we all got lazy LEA's who simply want to fill up the undersubscribed schools ?

I really don't understand the logic of expanding a good school. The inevitable logic as you say, wheresmysuntan, is that everyone in the town goes to them. So they'll need 240000 places!

I know this is simplistic, but why not just make them all good?

Then no one would have to lie, cheat, or report other parents.

I know I know, I'm living in cloud cuckoo land. Ridiculous idea, that everyone should be entitled to a decent education wherever they live.

Sorry - wanted to add to OP that I think you were brave to make a stand and did the right thing. If your child is 31st that is possibly because once SN and siblings were taken into account then the rest of the list was done on proximity? Then if this parent lied about address and her so-called address was nearer then her lie was most definitely denying your child a place.

another question - how much is being a good school dependent on the type of intake it gets and how much on the staff calibre? Do all good teachers desert the schools with challenging children in the end? I know quite a few teachers and none of them want to teach at a particular secondary school in the area as they would spend far too much time disciplining and not enough teaching.

IME, as a teacher AND a parent, a really good school has everything to do with the teachers and a little to do with the catchment area. however, a 'bad' school is more likely to be the result of average leadership unable to cope with a challenging cohort of children.

a pretty undynamic bunch of teachers could coast along in a middle class area, but give the same staff a really tough bunch of kids, and they could fail dismally to create a 'good' school environment.

we have a school close to us that has been renamed and 're staffed' countless times. it has failed again and again. it is now closed for good. it is in a VERY rough area. quelle surprise.

A family in DS1's class cheated - i didn't know at the time, but another mother told me 'no-one speaks to Mrs X because they pretended to have split up and rented a house outside the school gate then miraculously got back together again when shcool started and ditched the rented flat'
Then after two years, at age 7 they moved him to a private prep school!

The logic of expanding a good schgool is to save dozens of kids from having a crap education.
There is a limit of course, but just because it deson't help everyone, doesn't mean kids should be screwed over to save the careers of crap teachers, and avoid annoying the educational establishment.

To be strictly fair DC's interpretation of what I said, "that good schools should have their expansion limited so as to keep crap ones going", is not my own. That isn't how I would, or indeed did, phrase it.

Nobody wants to see crap schools, anywhere. But we all want to see standards pushed up across the board - don't we? Expanding "good" schools - and there will always be debate about the criteria one uses to define "good" - creates its own problems, such as the example I give in my post of 17:40.

And exapnsion doesn't address the real isues of why some schools are good and others bad, or attempt to resolve them - it just accepts the middle-class parental pressure to send kids to the "good" schools and indulges it.

Having said that, I'm as cynical as the next man about these "closing the gap" initiatives, as I fear - well, I know - that the movers and shakers in our city (not untypically, I bet) are people living in affluent postcodes who send their kids either to the very best state schools or to the private ones. No gap will be closed as long as a city/borough is run by a mafia with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - and that means maintaining the disparities.

The school situation in this country is so ridiculous that people are driven to do sill things even fraud!I think it is bad enough putting your neck on the line and lying like that to get your child an education without someone telling tales which could seriously impact your life.It is better to keep out of these things Karma will deal with them if they have done wrong which I'm not sure they have it is not your place to do this Sorry

Let's not assume "poor" schools=crap teaching either. In my experience (DW is a teacher and so are many of our friends) the best teachers can often be found in the most "challenging" schools because that's where they can do their best work. Getting the best out of kids who would otherwise have nothing.

It's easier for a crap teacher to coast in a school with a good reputation - the "raw material" they have is easier to work with.

What's a greater achievement - helping a class of kids who are predicted As and As anyway (thanks to good parental influence and private tutoring) to get those self-fulfilling As and As - or to coax a bunch of Ds and Es out of kids who are predicted to get nothing? DW's last school was always bottom of her LEA league table, and yet they pushed their results higher and harder than any of the schools at the top.

The problem with changing the system is that it may be better for everyone in the future, but it may also negatively affect the kids that are at school now - and their parents are not going to tamely accept that.
In our borough, there are three successful schools close together near the centre of town and on the edge of the borough a school whose numbers have been dropping for years, to the point where it is now hardly viable. It used to have very bad results, they are now a lot better, but it's reputation is still 'a crap school' - it's the one you get stuck with, not the one you want. A large proportion of its pupils come from the neighbouring borough,because it's actually still better than many of their schools.
The council have tried various ways of solving the problem, including moving one of the successful schools to the south of the town - where about half of its pupils come from anyway. But that was defeated by a vigorous campaign by the parents who live close to the school - it was their children they were concerned about, not those a few years down the line who would have benefitted.
And because decisions like this are ultimately made by politicians who are looking at the next election, the idea was dropped.

UQD is right, not all schools for poor people have crap teachers.
Ofsted sees itself as on the side of the providers of education, not the consumers, so there is almost no information that is both objective and up to date.
Even if there were, many British parents simply lack the education or interest to understand it.

They go for things they can understand, uniforms, sport, and gossip.
Value add, the issue that UQD and I agree on is rarely used.

RustyBear has a point, but I think she's being too hard on the parents, and too soft on the council. Any council interference will be dogged by their internal politics and brute lack of basic intelligence. I'd no more want the council moving my school than doing dentistry on me.

Their spin was that they were trying to save a school, another interpretation is the money that clearly involved. What happens to the school that's being moved ? Hmm lots of land to be sold, nice wad for the council, and I wonder if a "friend" of the council wants to redevelop it ?
Sight unseen I'd bet money that the new site has much smaller playing fields ?
Counciles hate school playing fields, their "friends" want to build profitable homes on them, but those pesky parents often complain.

Actually they were going to turn the old school into a vocational centre - they also had plans to build a special school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties and a Pupil Referral Unit for children with behaviour and attendance problems.

But I'm not defending the council, as you may have seen in a previous post, I am very unghappy about education being controlled by local politicians.They were being very secretive about the whole affair - as they then were about further plans to close the unsuccessful school. There is Government money involved, which would have been available for the new school they were going to build & I think they were desperate to keep it.

But if they expand the good schools (which would be very difficult as they nearly all have site constraints) what happens to the children that are left at the bad one? No good teachers will want to work there, it will have so few pupils it will be economically unviable.

Trouble with expanding 'good schools' is that you can rapidly end up with a 'not so good school'. Our nearby 'outstanding' and 'beacon status' primary (not our DCs' school!) remained so because only 50% of the kids came from the local (by and large rather well to do) catchmented area, the other 50% were hand picked via interview by the head. Bloke threatened to resign when another nearby primary was due to close as a result of a falling roll and the kids redistributed, some to his school. He knew d* well that his results could well be driven down by the inclusion of other kids, the non-selected hoi-polloi. So he managed to keep them out.

In summary, a reason why 'good' schools may resist expansion is because they've 'selected' usually by house price the kids they want so expansion could well include 'second division kids' who'd drive the SATS down. Stands to reason. Even if completely unacceptable!

Hi, do you know this person who 'cheated' well? Only asking as you may not know what is happening in her private life and if she really is living with her brother due to financial problems etc.

There is a mum of one of the girls in my DS class who was suspected of cheating her way into my sons school (very good school) she used her mums address when applying for the school and once she had her daughter in, then moved the 10 min drive away from the school gates back to her home.

She was ignored and comments were made about her until mid year 1 when she moved back to her mums house and for us to discover that her husband was a serial adulterer and was on his 4th (or something ridiculous like that) affair and he had thrown her out of the house and had got himself (again) into huge debt.

You cannot possibly know what this womans reasons were for putting down her brothers address and if she does perhaps live there part time or need help from her brother for child care etc etc.

I am sure that you must feel terrible to learn that your ds did not get a place in the school and this is heartbreaking to you as a mum (I know how fraught it is to get into the school of your choice - Ive been through it with my DS) but Im not sure that reporting her for something that you may not be right about was correct.