Admissions delay, is this normal?

[Johntaylorschin]

In my area in year admissions are taking months to process, children are allocated a school place but it is taking months for the academy schools to arrange admissions meetings and allow children to start, the CME team said it can take a year to get children into school.

I’ve looked at legislation and there doesn’t seem to be any rules about how quickly children should start after being offered a place, also all our schools are academies and the complaints system through the local council doesn’t apply.

Is this common elsewhere or just in my SE town?

This is my day job for an LA and I'm not in the south. Some of the schools I deal with are absolute dicks about admitting kids but we escalate to the head and then the trust where they delay admission.

Does the LA coordinate in year admissions? If they do then the CME team and the admissions officers are doing a terrible job. They have to report to the DFE monthly how many kids are cme and why. I'd escalate to the Exec Member for children and young people if no joy via their admissions lead

If it's an area where you need to apply to schools and can't find a place the LA needs to use the fair Access protocol
Specifically category L which is
children who have been out of education for 4 or more weeks where it can be
demonstrated that there are no places available at any school within a reasonable
distance of their home. This does not include circumstances where a suitable place
has been offered to a child and this has not been accepted.

Oh and it's not the norm. My LA deals with about 7000 in year applications per year. We place the majority of kids within two weeks and then on rolled within 10 days of the offer. Where we have lack of spaces (mostly Year 10 and 11) and have to go through Fair Access these take longer but no more than 4 weeks to offer and on roll within 10 days again

The report to the Schools Adjudicator by my LA (SE home county) speaks of serious delays because school are asking for more detail about dc, don’t respond in a timely manner and refuse admission when they have spaces. The fair access protocol is used around 450 times a year. There are clearly issues with schools. The LA has all secondary schools as academies but far fewer primary schools. The grammars (13) take on very few (1 child) for non standard intake. However other schools can be full too but others are not.

Undiagnosed sen seems to worry the schools plus they don’t allocate staff to admin for this role so decisions are not timely. It appears schools procrastinate a lot. Plus there’s difficulty over large families arriving and pressure put on school transport when the local school isn’t available. There’s school capacity but not where it’s needed.

Thanks for the replies, staffing issues are definitely contributing to the delay, teaching staff have to do the admission meetings but obviously they are teaching all day.

The local authority says the schools have spaces and the schools accept the admission but then don’t respond to calls or emails, even the senior leadership team ignore any attempts to contact them. I am trying to get contact details for the Chair of Governors but you have to email the school for contact details which they don’t reply to, have also contacted the local MP, local authority website says they don’t deal with complaints about academies have they have no control over them.

It's much quicker for most in my LA, but some children are hard to place.

@Johntaylorschin , no, this is not common. I am a governor for an academy and have never come across it in my area. All the secondaries are academies here.

It would surprise me if all the academies in your area were acting like this. It's more likely that there have been individual cases that have been protracted, for individual reasons.

Are you currently trying to navigate this process for your own child? It wasn't clear from your original post.

In my school the admissions meetings are done by the Head of Year. They are teaching staff, but they have a TLR giving them additional responsibility.

... just adding that the school's Complaints policy/procedure will be on its website. Follow it, and if you get no resolution from that then you can escalate to the DfE:
www.gov.uk/government/publications/complain-about-an-academy/complain-about-an-academy

@rowzezWhy would a school not admit dc when it has spaces? It must admit. Obviously they say they cannot meet Sen needs and seek more info but this is a delaying tactic.

As admissions is a statutory procedure, is the complaints policy relevant?

Is this your DC you are talking about? Have they said they can't meet the SEN need? If you give more details of the specific circumstances people may be able to advise.

Of course it is relevant. If it is as you claim then it is potentially a case of maladministration.

@rowzez Not my dc! My LA makes an annual report to the school adjudicator about admissions. As I expect yours does. I don’t need advice, I used to manage school admissions. It’s very common for schools to look into Sen in detail before admitting. Even if they have space. Fair access protocol is used a lot and schools are delaying admissions unreasonably. Your La might tick the report boxes saying every part of admissions is working very well but even when schools have falling rolls they don’t admit in a timely manner. A year is outrageous but it’s hard work for admissions teams.

As for complaints, see attached.

Yes, I had a feeling this wasn't a personal issue, which is why I asked. You have been given some vague info from a third party, which may or may not be correct or exaggerated.

The statutory process for admissions your screenshot is referring to is the appeals procedure, which doesn't apply in the circumstances you describe. It is a maladministration issue, so needs to go through the school complaints process then be escalated to the DfE (for academies) or the Local Government Ombudsman (for LA maintained schools).

Of course, in the specific cases that your informant was referring to, there may have been other things going on that we don't know about, so people can't really comment on that.

This kind of delay is definitely not normal. Paragraph 2.31 of the Admissions Code requires schools to make arrangements for a child to start school as soon as possible after an offer has been made, particularly if the child is out of school. As others have said, delays of months are maladministration and should be referred to the ESFA or the LGO, depending on the type of school.

@OhDear111 isn't the OP BTW...

Ah, yes, thanks - my mistake.

Thanks again everyone, this is not for my own child but I work in an area of child welfare and this is an issue affecting many children, some with SEN, some of whom have been home educated and now want to move back into school, some who have been permanently excluded from several schools and wait a year for a place at a special unit. When I speak to people in different roles in the education department they share my frustration but say they are struggling to change anything as schools just say no.

I will follow up on the links as this is not good enough and something needs to change, however it’s not strictly my job role but I will keep raising it as an issue.

It's possible that a delay could be introduced if a breakdown in relationship between LA and an academy results in a referral to the Secretary of State using the Admissions Code clause below, but that would be before the place is allocated, not after ...

@OhDear111 re schools trying to refuse admissions even though there are places available in the year group, there's always para. 3.10 et seq of the Admissions Code. In some - hopefully the vast majority - of cases, this will be being used appropriately, although unfortunately, ime, sometimes the phrase playing fast and loose is a polite version of the thought that springs to mind.

@MarchingFrogs It’s interesting to read up about how schools are delaying enrolling dc. It seems to me, the law is saying what the process is, and spells out rights, but ensuring it happens is another matter and LAs are toothless in speeding matters up. Yes, I was polite about how some schools behave. If they won’t engage, it leaves parents and LA frustrated, whatever the law says. Taking matters further builds in yet more delays.

None of this is new either. Heads have been behaving like this for decades. Another issue is large families being rehoused with no school available locally. Long journeys are then an issue. Many arrive with unmet needs and unidentified needs at times. Units and special schools are always full. The population is very fluid in some places and people inevitably want a place where there’s pressure on places. That doesn’t mean that the majority of schools are not fine and admit.

Councils should fine schools who do not admit promptly, big fines. That will change things very quickly.
It is just not OK for kids to be out of school. All the research clearly shows this. People move house and all admissions need to be prompt, like in most other European countries.

What would help is for funding to be accessible as soon as a student is enrolled, rather than having to wait until the April after the next October. As it is, any child admitted on the 5th October 2025 will be educated out of the existing pupil based funding - if a school ends up taking two students per year, particularly when they could be high needs, in receipt of Free School Meals, require intensive SEND support without an EHCP and especially where it is purely so there is a main school to pay the bill for specialist provision off-site (as otherwise the LA would have to pay for it), they're going to be down a couple of teaching salaries until April 2026. At which point, they'll then have another ten unfunded students to meet the needs of as well.

@NeverDropYourMooncup,
this is an interesting point, the school said they had nearly 100 in year admissions following a mass exodus from another school, they have currently processed 20 of those applications, the rest have been told a space is available but need to wait for an admissions meeting, I wonder if the list will move quicker after April?

That's a pretty unusual situation, and important context for your original post.

@Araminta1003 But they are not LA schools? What fining mechanism would they use? Not lawful either I suspect.