Advice needed after no secondary school offer from preferred choices

[Atlanta04]

We applied for 6 schools and unfortunately My daughter was not offered any preferred place of secondary school, I have refused the alternative offer of the undersubscribed school place. The position of where my daughter is on the waiting list show that she will not be offered a place and our only chance of a decent school is winning an appeal. Is there anyone who could give advice please?

Plz could we have a bit more info: what area are you in and where on the waiting list are you?
Waiting lists move especially in September

lbh&f and all but one position on waiting list is above 90 and the only closest is 23rd but this school has two feeder schools, so my child’s chance was only for 17 places available yet her criteria category of living within the radius had 179 applicants, therefore there is very little movement and I have already been told by the school an offer is highly unlikely and my only possible chance is to appeal.

Do you have actual grounds for an appeal?

The advice is to always accept the school given as it doesn’t affect waitlists or appeals. Having rejected it, the LA now has no responsibility to school your child. What is your plan if no appeal is successful?

Is it possible to retract your refusal for the school you were offered as not doing so puts you in a really bad position.

If you read the LA rules you’ll see that refusal of a place means they no longer have a legal obligation to find a school for your child. You may be lucky with your appeals but if you aren’t then they are quite within their rights to say there isn’t any place anywhere for your child.

I realise you may well never consider the offered school under any circumstances however by accepting it you remain in the system and are still the LA’s problem to sort out. By refusing it you have legally broken that link and they can wash their hands of you is they choose to do so.

Have you looked at all other schools in the wider area to see if they are better than the allocated school? Check to see if they are undersubscribed or if you could be higher on the waiting list. Even ones you have never heard of or that you ruled out the first time

I applied for schools out of the borough also, I am not willing to neglectfully send to a unsuitable school which does not align with any of our values and also means walking to a school through two parks where crime and gang rates are very high, I would rather home education than compromise safety.

I would start putting plans in place for Home Ed then because it sounds like that would be a real possibility.

I know a family who rejected the offered place, didn’t win the appeal and sure enough, their dc was sat at home at the beginning of September. They did get a school eventually but well in to the first term.

Do you have good grounds for appeal?

Did you apply for schools within catchment? If not you were taking a big risk and this probably explains why you didn’t get an offer from any of those schools. Which schools did your dd friends apply to?
I would see if you can reverse your refusal of the school offered - by remaining in the system you can stay on the waiting lists - you may have to wait until year 8 for a place to become available.
Have you actually visited the school offered? You may end up liking it.
The alternatives are to home school or even move house to be nearer your preferred schools

Ok..
So first you have an alternative - home educating for up to 5 years. Presumably all the curriculum so your DC is not behind if a suitable place comes up. Paying for any external tutoring that is needed, and entry fees for GCSEs. That's good.

You cannot use alternative is home educating as an appeal argument. In fact accepting offered school and then showing what the school you are appealing for offers over the offered may actually have more success, otherwise it could look like you are trying to blackmail the panel.

Apart from results and ofsted what is it about the school you are appealing for that specifically benefits your specific child. Eg family who speak Spanish, thus school teaches Spanish, offered school does not. Eg has a school orchestra, your DC plays the oboe, offered school does not.

You talk about values. So eg if all schools applied for are Catholic then use that. However if values are just 'i want a good school with well behaved kids' that is harder.

By no longer having an 'offered school' I think you have made your life harder.

Not sure a child without an education plan can be described as 'safe' but if safety is your main concern...

You should not have refused the offered place - you have basically given the LA the legal right not to place your child at all, so they are unlikely to do so.

You must always accept and then appeal.

What are the grounds for appeal?

from what you have said so far you don’t seem to have any other than “don’t like that one” which isn’t valid

It sounds like the wait lists are too long to get a place off there.
So, are there any other schools with spaces that are acceptable? Apply to those.
Can you afford private? Try that.
Otherwise, start researching home education.

For the appeals, why does your daughter deserve a place at one of the schools you want? What is it about that school (you'll need yo do them one by one) thst means your daughter should get a place?

As a comment, given home ed is the alternative, presumably you could just accompany your child to and from school , or take a longer route to avoid unsafe areas.

Appeals are fairly hard to win. Something like 20% succeed, but rates vary massively. You are unlikely to win based on arguments you have currently shared around not wanting your DC to walk that route to school or having issues with the allocated school. Presumably your DC could avoid walking through the parks, it would just be a longer route.

Did you apply to your nearest school, plus other local schools? Advice is to have at least one 'sure bet' school, which is usually the nearest or catchment school. In some areas this isn't possible unfortunately.

You can make an appeal for the school closest to you, but you need a plan B. Unless you are genuinely willing to home educate, you need to speak to your LA and find out if any schools have places, and then decide which is your best bet. You can look outside the borough, as if they have places then distance won't matter. Also any local schools where you will be high up on the waiting list.

It's tough when it doesn't work out, but if you are not proactive, you are fairly likely to have no place in Sept. You may feel that is better than what you have been offered, but you will need to decide if home education is really the right option for your family.

Well, now that you've left the system, I'm not sure how you think you're getting a school place at a preferred school (waiting list or appeal)

Did you not know what the consequences were of the refusal?

If you can home educate, that surely means you /dad aren't working/ could afford to stop working... , so could accompany her on the journey to school?

And what values do the school have that aren't in alignment with yours?

I too think you are going to end up home educating.

If yoir only chance in appeal then I suggest you read up on appealing before you do anything else as you have already made quite a big mistake by rejecting the offered place as now you are not in their system anymore and they have no obligation to find a place for you.

I have won an appeal but in my case my dd had no school place at all and one could not be found so I appealed for the closest school on the grounds that it was tue closest school. I think it helped that it was not particularly desirable, just full. But anyway, I didn’t understand anything about the process before I appealed but I made sure I understood it back to front.

Things like walking through parks are not relevant because you are appealing for a school, not against a different school. Nor can you infer that a school isn’t good enough for your child.

You have to look at things like extra curriculars. Is your dd a chess champion or a long jumper and does the school offer chess or athletics?

Really, I think you need to plan to home educate which is a huge financial sacrifice.

If you are able to afford for one adult to be unemployed in order to home ed you cane probably afford independent schools...

I have another younger child with a school run in complete opposite direction so it would not be possible to drop off/up both time wise. private or home ed are also options so I am not under duress of la dictatorship and I remain firm that I put my child first. I didn’t just refuse the school because we didn’t like it but safety is paramount I refuse to compromise to tick a box for LA.

i don’t regret refusing it, it was not a suitable alternative and I stand on that.

we do have some good grounds for appeal but seeing some of these responses i don’t think I will put out more details on here. I am most certain that I am doing all of the right things and covering all basis for my child’s well being and education to thrive moving forward, after all I mean that is my purpose as their mother.

What grounds for appeal do you have?

Because right now, you have none.

I'm guessing you have research home education and can afford for one of you to give up work.and presume younger child will need to be home educated too, you can afford to be out of work for the next ...7-10+ years?

Happy that you’ve got it all sorted, OP. Looks like you didn’t need any advice after all.

To succeed in an appeal, you will need to demonstrate that there’s more disadvantage to your child by not attending than there would be disadvantage to the other children by the school taking over the allocated number of students, and the bar for this is high (rightly so) so you need specific reasons why you need a particular school rather than reasons why you don’t like the school you were offered.

First priority is putting something in place for Sept - accepting the place offered and accompanying your child to school and back would have been a lot easier than considering home ed at secondary! but if you’re considering home ed there will be costs and plans needing to be put in place - start now.

Could you look at private - if you believe you’ll have capacity to home Ed, could you look at increasing your work instead and look at scholarships or bursaries?

Consider an online only school?

Move areas?

If you have other options then great, you have a plan B.

This thread is quite hostile, so can understand you not posting any more. I'd be inclined to wait a bit and then start a new thread with your appeal grounds if you want advice on that. There are also lots of other appeal threads you can have a read of if you haven't already.