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’d dig your heels in regarding school transport. Surely both children would be eligible as attending nearest available schools? What are the start/ finishing times?

That would help surely as on your wife’s days off she could put dc into taxis even going in different directions.

Then you just have five drop offs/ pick ups to consider. My children get school transport and they pick them up 45 minutes before school despite it being 15 minutes away. They are dropped off at the school gate ( manned by a staff member) and Dc play in playground for half an hour. This works for me as I drive to work in the opposite direction. Council often run school bus services early to ensure children are on time.

I think it’s feasible to get youngest in taxi and then get to school.

Also if there is an after school club at youngest she could attend 2 afternoons and there are all your problems solved. If not it is much easier to find an after school babysitter than a before school one.

Usually transport to catchment school
is provided if Dc qualify on distance/safety. Not to any school you choose. For obvious reasons.

Both DC going to catchment school would solve this. So DC1 needs to be on the waiting list for catchment school. It is parental responsibility to get Dc to school. As others have said, it’s necessary to look at ways this can happen. Often farmers can be flexible with hours. Just hope it doesn’t last forever.

By choosing non catchment, it does not give rights to subsequent Dc unless they qualify under the admissions criteria. Other dc are now higher up the admissions criteria. Those wanting schools isn’t static. So OP gambled and lost. If DC1 had gone to catchment, DC2 would be sibling snd catchment. Both would get transport. Unfortunately there is a cost to choice.

If the school has a formal catchment area, they will allocate places to those who live in catchment. If you had sent your eldest to your catchment school, your youngest would also have a place there. You would not have fallen foul of the system, as you put it. Some parents, both in the country and in towns, do the same as you - send their eldest to a school you prefer that isn't the catchment school and hope that their youngest will also get a place there. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. In your case, I'm afraid it hasn't. The only difference with being in the country is that the distances involved are greater.

Every year, there are parents on here complaining that they can't possibly be expected to get their children to two different schools. Of course, for those who live in towns or cities the complaints are usually about the time it takes rather than the distance involved. I'm afraid the response is always the same. Appeal panels are trained to understand that this is not a valid argument for any case, and particularly not for an infant class size case.

When Tony Blair's government introduced the infant class size limit, they set these strict rules. Many appeal panelists don't like to serve on primary school appeals because they see many cases that are far more deserving than yours, where the child is clearly going to be disadvantaged because they haven't been admitted, but the rules don't allow them to help. Sniping at the appeal panel for simply doing their job as required by law is not a good look.

OP I think you forget tho that those of us who live in cities may have shorter journeys but may either

1. Have to walk so literally no where to park anywhere near
2. A one mile journey can take 25 min
3. Catchments of 0.2 miles aren't uncommon so you are lucky if get a near by school
4. Almost all families I know have two working parents whose jobs are not 9.30-2.30 etc
5. Most parents head to work at 8am or earlier if they don't work shifts

They get back 6pm or later Rural / farmer is a red herring

As I explained, the catchment school was oversubscribed 2 years ago, it suited the council to send our daughter out of catchment, everyone is assuming she would have got it, given she's 6 miles from the catchment school and they allocate places from the school starting outwards, this is at best an unknowable assumption. Certainly there are plenty of tales locally of eldest children not getting into their catchment school if they live on the edge of catchment.

Almost all schools are oversubscribed due to the way the system works. Imagine there is a town with 3 schools, each of which will admit 50 pupils. There are 150 pupils needing places. All the parents name all three schools on their applications. The schools therefore are oversubscribed - they each have 150 applications and only 50 places. But everyone still gets a place.

Without knowing which schools we are talking about, it is impossible to know if you would have got a place for your eldest at the catchment school if you had named it as your first choice. So yes, it is possible you could have named it as first choice and still ended up in this situation, but it would have been less likely. However, my point is that you chose to name another school as first choice. That meant your eldest would end up there if it had a place available, regardless of whether there was a place at the catchment school. They didn't give her that place because it was convenient or because it suited them. They gave her that place because it was the highest preference with a place available.

Anyway, in the OP I asked if anyone had managed to appeal a similar journey distance, the response has been conclusive thanks.

To summarise:

We are naive idiots who got what we deserved.

I am some kind of patriarchal dinosaur.

The government and local authority is entirely competent, the continuous oversubscription is not a problem, and the fact that infant siblings regularly end up in different schools miles apart is absolutely fine because it always happens. (The school the eldest is in requested 2 form entry this year, seeing the large oversubscription coming but the council refused it)

The 6 year old can suck up the 40 mile daily commute.

Maybe we'll get lucky in the future and be able to move one child to the other school, maybe we won't. Again this is all normal and reasonable, no reason to question the justice of this.

I'm sure i've missed something but I think I've got the main points?!

The fact is, children on the edge of catchment under the Cambridgeshire system are going to be pushed from school to school over large distances in a way that those living in town are not, regardless of which school they put first on the application form. This is not whining or bleating, it's just a statement of fact based on the way the admissions policy is written.

Unless you want to argue that noone should live out in the countryside then this is a system which clearly needs to change, as evidenced by the fact that other rural counties don't do it.

I appreciate that the view of this thread differs from mine, principally because most people live in towns where there are always local options.

The council has to provide DD2 at least with transport to school. You might be able to push on DD1 too.

You and your wife, between you, have to make sure there's an adult caring for both DDs before the school transport picks them up and after it drops off. Which like pretty much every other family with young children, means that if you both need to leave for work too early, you need to pay for childcare.

How long does each drive take?
Im in london so the distances are not massive but the time taken to travel is looooong. I drive to the area my son's school is in (he has SEN so goes to a school far from our house), i have found a childminder there do drop off. Then i drive to my DD school (shes nursery class and hardly any schools near sons school/our house have a nursery class) then come home .

All in all it's about 1.5 hr of travelling each way (🤐), i probably am eligible for transport but he's happier with me driving atm (and he gets spoiled and fussed over by CM). If your wife can find a childminder near your son's school she could drop him there?

Which bit do you think other rural counties don't do? Giving priority based on proximity to the school is pretty standard. That means children living on the edge of a catchment area may miss out on their catchment school and end up with one further away. That happens in all rural counties. Unless the catchment school has enough places to take all the children living in catchment, it is inevitable.

out in the countryside then this is a system which clearly needs to change, as evidenced by the fact that other rural counties don't do it.

Norfolk do. As you can see from page 24 here,

www.norfolk.gov.uk/-/media/norfolk/downloads/education-learning/admissions/parents-guide-to-admissions-2023-2024.pdf#page19

LA admissions schools prioritise catchment siblings (criteria 3) significantly over non catchment siblings for reception (criteria 10) same as Cambs.

But this isn’t about being on the edge of catchment, is it?

The issue here is that you are not in catchment for the school your older child attends and so the younger hasn’t got a place. The strength and weakness of a system based on catchment areas is that you’re either in or out - being on the (inside) edge of the catchment area only becomes an issue if the school can’t accommodate every child in catchment and uses distance as a tie-breaker. Many schools place out of catchment siblings in a lower admissions category.

There’s a formal procedure for changing schools’ admissions arrangements. If you believe Cambridgeshire need to change theirs, you could begin by contacting your councillor, but please disabuse yourself of the idea that townies have it so much easier. I’ve recently chaired a lot of ICS appeals in an urban area. The distances concerned might have been smaller, but the problems parents faced were no different to yours and their journey times between home, school and work were probably just the same.

Many schools place out of catchment siblings in a lower admissions category.

This seems like a good system to me as the sibling rule definitely pushes out children who live close to the school in favour of siblings who live three villages over where I live. It causes a lot of resentment as well as practical difficulty.

The OPs dc2 could have ended up in a third school more than eight miles away if the catchment school had the sibling rule as dc2 doesn't have a sibling there.

The whole issue has arisen because you chose an out of catchment school for Dc 1. This means there was built in jeopardy for dc2. You don’t seem to be able to accept this but many LAs work this way.

You are missing the point that there will ALWAYS be people who are unhappy because it is normal for schools to be oversubscribed.

The rules are they will allocate to 1st choices where possible. You got that for your first child. You saying they wouldn't have got into the other school because of overscription is irrelevant. You tried to beat the system and only got caught out when it hasn't worked for your second child.

If you had gone through the system as it's designed it work via catchments, you might have been ok and you'd have more of a case. But as far as the council are concerned you got your first choice not a second choice because you automatically dismissed the catchment school.

You decision to send your first child out of catchment and expect to get the second one in there is hypocrisy. You want other people to be inconvenienced who live within the catchment area of that school so your more special child can go to school there. It means they could be pushed into a situation where they can't get a second child into the non catchment school and have to send them to a different one EXCEPT they didn't get any choice nor first preference over which school they applied for.

This has now been said repeatedly and you are being increasingly rude about it to posters. Your attitude will not help get what you want. It will only work against you. It's certainly not winning you sympathy here.

Accept it and find an actual solution. Put your kids on a waiting list to switch and solve the issue if necessary.

By sending your dc1 to your dw school you have deferred this situation for a couple of years, but it was never sustainable longer term. Had they gone to the catchment school the round trip would be similar. Is dc2 on waiting list and in what position? Why did you only get placed in May, admissions would have confirmed mid April.

OP it isn’t an “unknowable assumption”. The council publishes the allocations and the ones for 2021 are here. You will need to look at the criteria for the specific school DC2 is going to in order to see whether Dc1 would have got in goes to see what category of catchment.
https://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/asset-library/reception-allocation-information-september-2021-round-1.pdf

FWIW our preferred option for our Dc1 was a catholic school - we attend church but Protestant so were something like category 8b of 10. We looked carefully at the prior years allocated places and concluded maybe 50-50 we would get a place if we put as first choice. But we had Dc2 to consider and they would only be category 8a trumped by categories 1-7. So a significant risk they couldn’t follow their sibling with all the logistical issues that presents . So in light of that we chose another school where we would be able to get them both in.

In Cambridgeshire, if your child is allocated an out of catchment school because the catchment one you applied to as your first choice is oversubscribed, then younger siblings are treated as in-catchment siblings for the purposes of admissions to the allocated school. There is no perfect system, but they have tried to make it as fair as possible. Essentially, all the incentives are there to make you put your catchment school as your first choice. Don't get me wrong - we've also gambled on out of catchment schools. But it is a gamble, the rules are made crystal clear about the risks you take when you do this.

Op, you seem bent on attacking the ‘strong’ side of the council’s argument. They have allocated your younger child’s school place according to the rules, and you are not going to get any further trying to change or bend those rules.

Where you do have a case is in the refusal to offer school transport. Your younger DC, attending the catchment school at such a distance, should be allocated school transport. You can and should fight for that.

Once you know school transport timings, you can then work on a option for childcare around those - au pair, childminder, morning nanny, neighbour, friend, yourself, wrap around care etc etc - that can work for you and could also work if/when an appeal place or waiting list place for your DC1 arises at your catchment school.

I don’t think you have said which month your DC2’s birthday falls in? One further option would be to apply to defer their start to Reception until next year, giving you a full year for a waiting list place to arise for your older child (and then a Year 3 place the following year, which would make an appeal much easier).

In Cambridgeshire, if your child is allocated an out of catchment school because the catchment one you applied to as your first choice is oversubscribed, then younger siblings are treated as in-catchment siblings for the purposes of admissions to the allocated school.

That does seem as fair as it can be made - so if OP’s eldest had been allocated, rather than chosen, their current school, the sibling would have had priority? As they chose it, for a good reason but without thought for the impact on a sibling, the sibling does not get priority.

’Out of catchment siblings get priority’, by the way, can create awful problems of its own. Through families moving away from our then-local secondary catchment after the first child entered, effective catchment for first children for the year above my DS shrank to a fraction of its proper size. As all neighbouring schools were full from their own catchments, travel times to allocated schools were an hour or so each way. As soon as priority was changed to ‘in catchment siblings, then in catchment first children, then out of catchment siblings’, the effective catchment for first children returned to being the proper catchment boundaries.

We are working on a solution as best we can, in the OP I wanted to know if anyone else on here had ended up with similar distance school run and whether they had been able to challenge it, currently the answer to both questions is no.

As to rudeness, almost immediately I was accused of being 'one of those kinds of men', followed by accusations of trying to game the system etc. so I hardly think a bit of pushback was unwarranted.

We live in a tied cottage, obviously many (most?) parents try and buy a house well within catchment which helps with their school places, this is obviously not an option for us and as said, we are miles from either school.

Clearly we haven't played the game properly, and both children are on waiting lists. Our eldest childs school had 44 applicants for 30 spaces, our youngest lies 9th on the waiting list, so the chance of a move that way through the normal process is minimal. The other failed applicants were placed in a school 2 miles from their chosen school, it's the opposite side of the school from us, we weren't offered that and it is now full. Of the failed applicants ours is the longest commute, by far.

Obviously there is no fair system, but regularly having both local schools oversubscribed means for people way out of the towns and villages they run a high risk of falling foul of the situation. The opinion on this thread is that it's our fault, thats fine.

My opinion is that a system which places siblings 14 miles apart and doesn't allow either to move in either direction is a broken system which needs reform. I've contacted the relevant local councillors about this, who say they despair of the whole system and all attempts at change locally have failed. The MP says he sympathises and keeps promising to ask for something to be done, but hasn't responded. He's a government minister, I don't get the impression he views constituency work as a high priority...

My opinion is that a system which places siblings 14 miles apart and doesn't allow either to move in either direction is a broken system which needs reform.

The thing is that if the system had placed your eldest where they are, then it would have prioritised your younger child being with them.

As it is, you placed your eldest where they are, and the system has then worked according to the rules to place your younger one.

It is the ‘illusion of choice’ plus ‘a system that cannot accommodate all choices’ that catches parents out. The system nationally is not able to deliver true choice - popular schools cannot infinitely expand - so the best step the Government could take is to be honest that choice does not really exist.

In the days where everyone would automatically have been allocated catchment schools, with LAs flexing both catchments and school building /expansion / staffing / closure to fit (and with some spare capacity to play with, both your DCs would always have been in the catchment school.

We live in a tied cottage, obviously many (most?) parents try and buy a house well within catchment which helps with their school places, this is obviously not an option for us and as said, we are miles from either school.

plenty of families have little option as to where they live for a whole host of reasons. You are not unique in that sense. To be in a position to be able to buy specifically for schools is a very lucky position that few will be in.

having a system whereby out of catchment siblings are priority over children with no siblings also isn’t fair, it also encourages a lot more playing of the system amongst some people - I know of someone who lived near by got the eldest child into an over subscribed school and then moved out of catchment and still got the 4 siblings in - that meant 4 children who live closer missed out.

there is no ideal system but the issue people have here is your determination to make out your being victimised somehow. Your not.

As I said before, if you think local admissions criteria need to change, your councillors are the best people to approach. MPs have no formal role or say in how LEAs conduct their business and I suspect most would not want to get involved, because anything that benefits out of catchment families is likely to disadvantage families in catchment and so they will not want to get drawn into that conflict.

You keep asking whether anyone ever won a (presumably) ICS appeal on the basis of siblings being in different schools 14 miles apart. Nobody here can say it’s never happened, but it’s extremely unlikely unless the parent persuaded the panel that such a decision was so utterly unreasonable (in the legal sense) that it couldn’t be allowed to stand. More to the point, you appealed on these grounds and lost the appeal. You can appeal again in the next academic year. If you do, I suggest you don’t take the combative and sarcastic attitude that you have here. You need the panel to see you as a reasonable person so that, if things are borderline, they’re more inclined to give you the benefit of any doubt.