Primary school admissions - 14 miles apart

[Ruralparents]

Hi all

I thought I’d join to mine your collective wisdom!

We live in rural Cambridgeshire, 6 miles from our nearest school in one direction and 8 miles from the next nearest in another.

Back in the depths of lockdown we had to a choose a school for our eldest to start at in Sept 2021. My wife teaches at the school 8 miles away and so we chose it because it would be handier. We didn’t know if our eldest would get in there but she did. And it turns out that her catchment school, 6 miles away, was oversubscribed.

Now, in 2023 our daughters school is over subscribed and our youngest has been placed at the catchment school. These two school are 14 miles apart! We lost our appeal and have now got the prospect of trying to manage a 28 mile school run, twice a day.

Cambridgeshire council don’t care, they are hiding behind their protocols and passing the buck.

We asked if our eldest could move schools to be with our youngest and they’ve refused because her year group at the catchment school is oversubscribed.

Out of catchment siblings get the same priority as in catchment siblings in Suffolk and Norfolk, but not Cambridgeshire. And when you live 6 and 8 miles from the two schools it’s fairly obvious you’re going to be at the bottom of the admissions list when either school is over subscribed.

Has anyone had any joy appealing on the grounds of unreasonable journey times etc? I just don’t think anyone should be made to do over 10000 miles a year on the school run. School transport hasn’t been offered but even if we can get it, someone still has to be available to put a 4 year old in a taxi and to collect them etc, it doesn’t help the logistics.

There is an ombudsman, but I think they have just rigged the whole system in order to do as they please and screw those who live out in the sticks.

I don’t understand the 56 mile school run. If your DW works at one of the schools, doesn’t she have to go there anyway..? So if both your DC went to the school 6 miles away, you would still have the same journey to cover, surely, as your DW would still have to get to the other school 8 miles from your house? Or have I misunderstood that?

So, one example anyone who is childfree doesn’t get the same level of government support, yet pay the same, if not more taxes than most parents.

The government haven’t done a shoddy job in this instance. Because you think they have, doesn’t make it true and lots of people have pointed this out to you. If you don’t like the situation pay for private schooling to get your kids into the same place… but you won’t will you? Instead you’ll just continue whinging.

That was your example? I was just using the same context to explain that ignorance isn’t an excuse in any situation when the facts were readily available to you.

No, nothing shorthand here, I disagree with you. I think you’re acting entitled and I would say the same to you in person as well.

Wow thats harsh. Bit late to send the kids back and paying taxes for the schools I think its not unreasonable to have your child go to the same school as its sib. I think its perfectly reasonable and probably should be the 1st criterior to attend. Sibling links usually is. If a childs in LA care they get to go to any school and even go over accepted numbers in a class. And arent allowed to go to any school that isnt ofsted rated as good and above. So a simple sib link isnt really a big ask.

I still don’t understand. If both DC went to the school 6 miles away, the same journey would need to be covered as the DW would still have to travel to the school 8 miles away as this is where she works. Isn’t this a complaint about the commute to work rather than the DC being at different schools? How is it a 28 mile round trip. It’s 6 miles to school, 6 miles home (presuming the schools are in opposite directions and one has to drive back past the house), then 8 miles to the other school. And then stopping there as is a place of work for the parent. I make that 20 miles, 8 of which are actually the commute to work.

OP I can't believe the flack you're getting. All of your responses have been measured and concise. The accusations and personal attacks coming from other posters are baffling. Mumsnet can be such a shit show at times.

It's not a race to the bottom and just because lots of people are suffering doesn't mean everyone else should put up and shut up. There are nowhere near enough schools/places for children up and down the country and we shouldn't be sniping at parents that say hang on, this isn't great. Save the vitriol for the government!

I live in rural South West, our small market town is currently having more than 2000 new homes built with no additional schools/places, no additional dentist/doctors. The infrastructure just isn't there so situations like this will certainly become more frequent as parents will be forced to take what school place they can get.

Yes I know OP and wife chose the non catchment school but it really wasn't totally unreasonable of them to hope their 2nd child would also get a place based on being a staff child and having an elder sibling there.

Its 56 miles on the days my wife doesn’t work. Added to the other complications of having infants in different schools a long way apart.

And the expectation of the LA seems to be that you’ll move your eldest child if you need to, which is in itself wrong, except in this case they won’t allow movement either way. There aren’t other sensible school options due to the rural location, although we are considering an out of county option, although it’s not much better distance wise and has its own pitfalls

I see OP, yes 56 miles would be highly annoying and not very environmentally friendly either. How many days does your DW work? (Just wondering where the 10,000 miles per year figure came from * she asks missing the point a bit!)

All the childfree people I know accept the need for taxation in order to educate children in a sensible fashion.

Pay your taxes, but pay to use private schools AND stop whinging? Wow.

Just to clear up this entitlement accusation that keeps cropping up:

We applied to the school 8 miles away because on balance it offered the best solution in a rural situation, for the children of a teacher. If you don’t think the teaching profession is of much importance then state it upfront. If you do, then at least have the decency to accept that sometimes they will need a slight accommodation, at no financial cost to the LEA, in order to balance their work and family life.

My position is that all parents want steady teachers at their children’s school, and that it is not entitlement if in return those teachers sometimes need the support of their employer, any decent private sector company helps its employees where it can, or they leave.

If my wife were an accountant and I an engineer and we were moving house and applying out of catchment and all the other games that go on on, then it would be entitlement. That isn’t the case here and so I reject the accusation.

I can’t recall exactly now, it’s something like 56 miles a day 3 days a week and 40 miles a day the other 2, multiplied by 38 x 5 day weeks a year.

Its a lot of extra miles anyway and needs 2 parents/adults to manage it.

I don’t know if an appeal would help. Logistics isn’t usually considered grounds for appeal. I think you have to put your youngest on the waiting list for the school your wife works at. On the 2 days she works she can do the 12 mile trip to the other school to drop off your youngest and then drive to work with the older child. So 2 days a week she has to do 12 miles and then a commute to work (which doesn’t count in your mileage to do school drops as she would have to commute there anyway). Then the 3 days when she doesn’t work it’s either a 28 mile round trip for her. Agree - not very practical
for various reasons. Or she does one child and you do the other. And you wait for a place to come up at your wife’s school for the younger child. This is the disadvantage of living rurally I guess. I live in the city and pay an extortionate amount of rent but I don’t need to use my car most days. A friend moved out of the city into a rural area. Beautiful house and lovely village. But they moved back after six months as she said they didn’t realise just how much time they would need to spend in the car!! None of that helps you of course! I suppose when you live rurally there must be an expectation that there will be a fair bit of driving. I don’t know the answer to your predicament. Share the load on the days your wife doesn’t work and wait for a place to come free. Maybe put both children down on the waiting list for the opposite school and see which one comes up first.? Your wife would still have the 12 mile drop and commute to work on the 2 days she works. But at least only 12 miles instead of 28 on the other 3 days. Which would save 58 miles per week. Or 2,200 miles a year. (Not 10,000 but still quite a lot! ☺️)

Well we agree on something as I originally said that some people diligently put in more taxes than the resources they use in comparison to you. You asked for an example, I gave it. So not sure your point.

If you don’t like something, change it. That’s why I suggested private education as a solution to your predicament. There are plenty of people who think private education is better than state schooling, so they send their kids to private and guess what… they still pay the same taxes. Although I’m sure they’d be delighted for you to campaign on a tax rebate for them!

Whats being rural got to do with the price of apples? Like everyone you’ve freely made life choices, sometimes they come with a price tag. Them the breaks.

I’ve no idea why my opinions on teachers is relevant or has relevancy. But rules are rules, and by making an exception to the rules for you, it will likely cause another family a headache. So where does the LEA stop, because that family might have circumstances that they believe need appealing.

So it’s not entitled that you believe because of your wife being a teacher, you a farmer,
you live in a rural location and that you freely made a choice which has backfired that you should gain special dispensation at the detriment of another family.

Like I said, chalk it up.

@Loopylemon2 By your logic British farmers should just accept that the education system should discriminate against their child’s right to accessible education simply because of where their family have to live. Farms are typically in rural and isolated locations so if being a farmer means your child cannot receive accessible educational placements like everyone else then why would anyone want to be a farmer in the UK? Would you rather we imported all our produce from abroad?

It’s nonsense.

OP - having fought twice for my children’s school placements through the courts I would suggest consulting with a legal professional who specialises in education law. Just because it’s the LEA’s policy doesn’t actually make it legally binding. You’d be amazed at what some local authority’s will try to get away with. I say that as someone who as worked for several local authorities. You should not have to access legal representation, but it helps and shows the LA that you’re not to be messed around. Your children should absolutely not be exempt from the education system simply because of your profession and forced into expensive private education.

I should add, I don’t hate LA’s and am not trying to make them the villain. I have some sympathy for them. Many are being asked to do an impossible job and make resources stretch where they can’t simply because our education system has been decimated by our shoddy government. I have opinions but I’ll save them for another thread, don’t want to de-rail this one.

Ultimately OP, your children don’t deserve to pay the price for any of this. At this point it sounds like the educational placements they’ve been offered are not accessible to them.

@SourDoe - okay, let’s be real here, 6 miles and 8 miles from schools are not remote or inaccessible. They’re rural but not remote. By your logic, this means dispensation should also be applied to shift workers, Doctors, Nurses, single mums/dads who can’t afford to live in cities, Fire Brigade, etc. All of whom can also work in rural locations.

The problem here is that the OP made an error in judgement in putting his eldest kid in a non-catchment school and the younger child hasn’t been offered a place there. So they now find themselves in a situation where they will need to do more travel. That’s nobody else’s fault and I certainly don’t see why another family should suffer as a consequence.

I actually live in Cambridgeshire on the Suffolk boarder and I have a rough idea where the OP is located. Trust me when I say he is not in Outer Mongolia, we even have telephones out here now.

Barely, our internet has to come via SIM card. They’ve never connected the promised fibre internet.

I suspect you got on just fine with your admissions and so don’t see it as a problem.

@Loopylemon2 Thats exactly my logic, you’re correct. Just because a child’s family income depends upon a profession that places them in a rural location, does not mean that child’s access to education should be compromised. There are, as you pointed out many professions where this could apply. All the more reason to address this issue. And as you pointed out, this isn’t outer Mongolia, so its hardly unreasonable to expect the LEA to be equipped to provide adequate provision to meet the demands of children in that area, no?

In our area schools all have different admissions policies, I don't think it's county wide. In our catchment secondary school non-catchment siblings don't rank higher than in-catchment with no sibling which I take as to be a deterrent for people chancing a low birth rate year with their eldest and then pushing out catchment kids in the following years with their subsequent children. I have no problem with that personally as if you read the admissions criteria thoroughly you would be aware, and in our area the council publishes several years worth of admission data (what criteria people got in under) for you to assess the risk (I think not thoroughly checking this might be your only crime here 😉).

Did I read that you didn't find out until May though? Was it a late application? If so, on schools that are usually full on the first application are never going to have spaces for late ones, regardless of catchment or any criteria unfortunately as places are already allocated in the first round and it's a case of getting whatever is left at that point!

That being said.... I do sympathise with your frustration but they can't cater to every scenario in the policies. Your being so rural is very unfortunate, a lot of the suggestions depend on variables (like even what time bloody breakfast club opens, in some schools it's as early as 7.30, but not all!). Maybe also just wait and see what timing the transport offers.

I do very much think that children of teaching staff should rank MUCH higher as particularly in primary school as it's quite common for teachers to need to take their children to school with them. That doesn't help you though as any pushing for changes to admission policy would only help future people!

I think it's probably a case of suck it up until a place comes up at either school for the other one. Just because you're low down on the waiting list now doesn't mean that once school starts everyone above you would still want to switch schools. Once they've settled in a lot of people are then reluctant to take a place elsewhere.

It wasn’t a late application, we heard on the day everyone else did. If I said May at the start of the thread and the response date was April then I got that wrong. I dashed out the early posts from memory, I hadn’t anticipated the traffic this thread would cause!

The appeal was a drawn out process taking almost all term, the response arrived in the post on the last Saturday morning of term, leaving 3 days before the children broke up.

To the out of county schools immense credit, we rang them on the Monday and the headteacher herself gave us a quick tour on the morning of the last day of term, just so we could assess it as an option. She didn’t have to do that and it was much appreciated.

If they haven't responded to your points they've just rubber stamped it to get rid of you. I've, some time ago, only had successes in the independent appeal which I attended.
Hopefully it hasn't changed too much.
So go for it...there is no negative I can see by trying.

Indeed.
And anyways, you could do the school run for your youngest. Lots of dad do and not just the ones WFH…

@FaithHowells There is no way that any LA won’t have a schools plan for 2000 houses! Absolute tosh. Of course they have.

I find it interesting that people really live living in the countryside until they don’t have the convenience of everything going their way. I know a few very well off farmers. Should they really get priority at schools? Cambridgeshire cannot tell schools to admit teachers DC who live further away than local children. Local schools for local children makes complete sense to the majority. The op doesn’t seem to have friends who can help as they are also doing the school run. In rural communities this is normal. Or you get the school to your local school.

Legally I don’t see how an appeal can possibly succeed. Yes, op can have his day and plead, but he’s made this “Choice” knowing the rules. Had he used his local school and made local arrangements, as ALL working parents do, there would not be an issue now.

Cambridgeshire has closed a primary school this year because it was no longer economically viable - it was a small village school (Great Gidding) that was mainly used by out of catchment children, who for whatever reason didn't get on with their catchment school. There is a surplus of school places across the county.

Cambridgeshire suffers from a district/county split. The county council is responsible for schools and education, and the district councils are responsible for planning. The falling birth rate (2012/2013 was the absolute peak) and expensive housing means that our small rural schools face plummeting rolls- two schools near us have gone from single form entry to now only have four classes in total across the school in 2 years. District councils are faced with NIMBYs who object to any development at all, even when new housing might keep the schools and amenities open.

Large scale housing development in Cambridgeshire is generally well matched by new primary schools; small villages (group villages in planning terms, expected to support a primary school) are generally not allowed more than 8 houses in a development, unless it's an exception site.

What did you think would happen when you moved into a house a significant distance from any schools, with children who needed a school?

Oh god Loopylemon2 is on here spouting unhelpful rubbish as well! 🤦‍♀️

Have you considered home education? You could always just do it until you can get a place for them together. That would mean you had flexibility and freedom to do what you like and time to enjoy your rural home. I bet there are loads of home ed activities near you. We're fairly rural but have loads going on near us - forest school, farm schools, art classes, gymnastics, academic classes, as well as all the standard social meets etc. It means cheap, term time holidays and when you go for days out there are no queues, no crowds etc. We were also forced into it when we couldn't get suitable provision for my eldest. We decided we would do it for KS1 only and then once we got to KS2 we realised that it works for us so well that we carried on.

@manontroppo Lots of LAs have planning at district level. Planning for schools isn’t quite the same though. Land is allocated at a much earlier stage and is in an agreed development plan so it’s known that a new school will happen.

Glad someone is saying useful and truthful things about Cambs.