Request a state school place if you want it or not

[clarkkentsglasses]

This email is doing the rounds aimed at private school parents:

"The idea is to try to flood the Council with requests for urgent school places from September. If they get tens of thousands of emails like this we may see them under pressure."

Basically request a state school place if you want it or not.

There have been a lot more than 3 of them, even on this thread!

Won't make a jot of difference and shows a complete lack of knowledge on how councils deal with this sort of issue....
They don't.
Thousands of children do not have school places every September, October, November, December, January.... do you get the drift?
And basically that's it, eventually if you are lucky you will get a place... took me 10 months for one of my sons, then 2 months for my other son, and the 6 weeks when we changed county... oh and last year it was the last day of term we found out if my son had a school place.
Currently almost all of the children at one school which 2 of my friends children attend have been told no school places at that school next year....
Of course you can appeal and take the LA to tribunal but that's okay because currently the wait in this area is about 6/7 months.

So yes go ahead. I am looking forward to your children joining us because only then will politicians take notice when the wealthy are affected to.

@Hotnamehere

Nope, No empathy here. Private schools should be abolished completely.

If this were to happen, what would become of all the buildings, grounds, playing fields etc?
I doubt the government could afford to buy them, so should they be seized?

@riggleroom It’s 100% the people who want to change schools for September 24. That’s all they will consider right now. It has application dates and clearly says they consider people moving into the LA and others already living there. This is all
in the in-year transfer web pages. Therefore it’s fair to all parents. Of course it points out parents might not get any of the schools they express a preference for.

Yes it totally disgusts me that some individuals would deliberately sabotage state schools and by extension the children there. First you don’t believe it - “if you don’t screenshot it, it didn’t happen”. Then it is evidenced for you in black and white but you choose to minimise it to ‘not being that dramatic’ and just venting’. You have no way of knowing that. It is very obviously much worse than pathetic name calling.

No, it's not. Because it's not real. It's venting. So there's no actual harm.

Name calling and vitriol drums up anger at a minority in our society which may change people's behaviour. That actually causes more harm.

Especially when it's poster after poster name-calling and insulting. Do you not see how that's harmful?

Think about how hate speech is differentiated from simply offensive speech. Now I'm not saying that school choice is a protected characteristic at all! But it's that difference in harmful outcome they call out:

Speech that is simply offensive but poses no risk to others is generally NOT considered a human rights violation. Hate Speech becomes a human rights violation if it incites discrimination, hostility or violence towards a person or a group defined by their race, religion, ethnicity or other factors.

Poster after poster on this thread saying that private school parents are selfish, private school children are thick, we're cunts, we should be taxed 40%, we should be denied state schools.

It definitely falls into the category of 'inciting hostility'.

And it's laughable to say the insults and hatred haven't been one-sided!

Sure, you can pull out a few bad posts from private school parents. This is a public forum. And even normally-calm posters have occasionally got riled up.

But the sheer volume of insults and nastiness has been entirely one-sided.

<waits for the torrent of insults about me daring to mention human rights principles in the same breath as The Most Privileged And Evil People In Society>

@Paradoxygen How would private school parents do this if there are no spaces in state schools. The dc don’t get a place in a full school! Anyone can apply for a school place and go on a waiting list but even then, laws apply to admission and a waiting list must be ordered. I cannot see how mass applications translates into mass taking places. These would be mostly in year applications so many would fail. If they are successful, it’s because a school has places. Dc are welcome as it means more money for the state school if it fills its places.

The bigger issue could be more dc applying for YR and Y7 places next year. No one can query these applications from any angle and many dc come from preps to state anyway at y7. So I’m not sure how vast numbers of dc from private schools will greatly disrupt the system. Whst they will do is get the better schools because mostly the parents live in better areas.

Something written in a post purporting to be what someone else has written is hearsay, not evidence.

I think when a group of people think they are under attack, they fight back. Always the same! Name calling loses the argument of course.

Yes it totally disgusts me that some individuals would deliberately sabotage state schools and by extension the children there.

How do you think that would happen purely by making an application?

Completely agree with this. I too see it as the Brexit bus all over again.

I actually received a WhatsApp last night with the vile message about every private school parent applying to state school purely to disrupt the process. I’m utterly disgusted that it exists. What was slightly strange was that it came from a parent who I don’t know, have barely ever had contact with, and have had no contact at all for at least 12 years. So they must have sent this horrible message to their entire contact list. I was a tiny bit amused though because said parent happens to have the exact same name as a senior member of the Labour Party….

The private school parents doing this should be truly ashamed of themselves. As a private school parent myself though, I am utterly fed up of the insults being thrown on here. It’s quite extraordinary that grown adults think it’s ok to make such spiteful comments and harbour such hate for what parents do for their children. My family’s situation is not remotely ‘normal’. If it was then both of my children would be at local state schools. But it isn’t, so they’re not. My personal favourite insult so far is a poster describing the situation many private school families will be in if they can’t afford the extra 20% as ‘delicious’. If that’s not purest spite then I’m not quite sure what is.

Many of the most well connected and privileged people in society are well connected and privileged in spite of, not because of, the school they went to. Someone on another thread pointed out that Sir Paul McCartney’s children all went to local state schools. Good for him for making this decision, but they were hardly going to struggle in life with his name and connections…. My brother went to state school and then to Oxford. He has a phenomenally well paid job and brilliant connections from Oxford. Whenever private school parents are bitched about and insulted for ‘buying their children privilege’, I can only think those posters genuinely believe that every private school is like Eton. The vast majority of them are not. And yet it’s the Etonian equivalents who won’t be so much as touched by this loopy policy. All Labour is likely to achieve is to create even greater inequality in education.

Because it will slow down the application system if people apply when they have no intention of taking up a place anyway, it’s just putting more pressure on the admissions staff, they won’t employ anymore it will just take longer, so children that are genuinely out of school with no place for whatever reason will have to wait even longer

I don't work in schools admissions but I quite often hotdesk in the area they sit in (LA worker here). They work phenomenally hard to try to sort out school places for children moving into the area or wanting to change schools. If people make applications they have no intention of going through with, then it clogs the system.

It's a truly selfish, ridiculous act and I sincerely hope no one is tempted to try it.

5.5% of all students go to private schools. The rate of primary applications was down 2.3% and secondary applications was down 1.7% last year. Even if all the private school applicants needed state school places, there would be spaces. Not necessarily at their first choice school, but spaces nonetheless.

There is a link to the exact post in this thread. If you read back a bit you will find it. It is not hearsay, it is fact.

As I’ve said before, emotion is clearly clouding your judgement. Where is this torrent of abuse you were anticipating?

A space in Gairlogie would not help a child in Leith.

But if it were so simple, why the complaints about private school parents applying for school places? It seems there are simultaneously too few private school places to cause problems if they all apply to state schools, and so many that it would cause huge disruption to state schools if they did.

The intention is what is deplorable. The effectiveness is another matter entirely. Now that we have established (again) that the post is not a figment of someone’s imagination, would you care to comment on that?

If there are so few private pupils that they would have no impact on state schooling if they switched, why is the language about this form of protest so hyperbolic? They aren’t blocking ambulances on the M25, cutting up paintings in museums or sending threats to MPs such as they cannot attend hustings. It seems to me a rather mild form of protest that few private school parents will do and at most will waste a few hours of council admin. I think the private schools themselves would see it as counterproductive so would wish to stop it too.

Because it still causes work in allocating places even if there are places available to allocate there is a process that has to be followed and carrying out this process takes time. If a la employee is spending time sorting out an application for a child where the parents have no intention of taking up the place and the child is already attending a school then this is wasted time they could have used to sort the next child on the list. That child may have moved into the area and be at home without a school place at all as it’s not possible to apply to advance before you move

Because it wouldn’t be noticeable except to the people it effects such as the la admin staff and the children out of school waiting for a mainstream place, it could potentially have a big effect on these two groups of people and yet they have no say in if vat is applied to private school fees. The majority of the population and the government won’t care or probably won’t even notice.

There are 20% in private education at sixth form level. The other impact years would be Reception and Year 7 if someone applying when they didn't want a place could displace other children. Why are you also minimising this? Can you not see that the sentiment is selfish and shocking? I would say there is much more hyperbole from some private school parents about the impact of this policy when the truth is still that nobody really knows.

But surely all those extra admin hours on the council education budget will be hugely offset by all the extra money VAT will bring in? Or are you suggesting no one will notice the VAT?