I recently completed my online application for primary school admissions for Sept 09 for my son. I have now received an extremely disturbing letter from an Admissions and Transport Officer and am wondering how to interpret it:
I'll try and be brief, there are 4 schools in our area, 1 excellent, 2 good, 1 terrible (failing, about to be merged with a junior school to bring it up - obviously a lot of pressure to send children here as is only one not oversubscribed in area with severe shortage of primary school place - crisis couple of years ago in the press etc etc) lets call them schools A B C and X. We are equidistant between A and X and B and C are next nearest (B is a church school). For school X, apart from reputation, it is not walkable from our house wheras the other 3 are (only access is an unpaved, unlit road cut through the separating range of hills i.e is suicide to walk). So we would not, for both reasons, want school X.
On the form we listed A B C in that order and in the "reasons for this choice" I listed the fact that we could not walk to X as being a reason why we were "preferring" A B or C (would be happy with any) and indicated that X would be unsuitable to us for this reason (health and practicality - son cared for by grandmother when I am working who does not drive and familial history of heart disease (dad died at 50) mean we really want him to be able to walk to school).
So our form says A B C. I received a letter yesterday stating that, if I wanted the medical reason to be taken into account as a "Special Medical Circumstance" I would need to obtain a Consultant's letter (I didn't and indicated this on the form - it was part of my general reasons). The disturbing part is that the letter contains the following lines:
re: Application for Admission to School X
Thank you for your application form stating [blank] School as your first preference
and
Should your application for admission to school X be unsuccessful, your child's name will automatically be placed on the waiting list etc etc
Just to reiterate, a letter thanking me for my application TO A SCHOOL I DID NOT APPLY TO. I have phoned the contact centre who have confirmed that my son has the correct 3 preferences listed against his name on their systems but who were very cagey and would not discuss it further. The person who sent the letter does not start work until 2pm and they have asked her to call me, or, more likely, I will be calling her.
What am I to conclude from this?:
- Surrey County Council Admissions and Transport are incompetent idiots and it is an error?
- They have immediately pre-allocated him school X (even though they claim no decisions are made at this stage and that it is some inscrutable software application that makes the decisons) and this letter indicates a Freudian slip?