How to get into state school after private?

[Fossie]

I have taken my 2 elder children (girls) out of their private school after it was taken over and has changed so much we no longer want to continue there. We have a son at private school and a 2 year old. I want to find a state school for my elder two, keep my son where he is and get my youngest into the same school as elder two. But, all the decent schools have no places. We are not even top of a waiting list for our closest school and they have been on that waiting list for 10 months. The council say we have to find a school ourselves and can recommend ones with places but these are either far way or poor or both. I am now home educating. How can we get them into a good school? Hope someone has some good ideas out there.

MBW

One more thing - sorry, disagree totally that the appeals process is fair. Absolutely, completely not. It gives you a chance but it's all stacked against the parent if you have a school that's willing to lie and cheat.

Have you visited any of the schools you're talking about? Or just gone by ofsted reports and SATS results? Life is richer and more complex than that, or it could be, if you let it be for your kids. I went to rough schools. they were brilliant, nurturing places where I got a rounded view of life, my parents were brilliant and saw themselves as much as my educators as the school; between all that I got a very good education and did well.

The fact is that there is no choice in the system; you go to your catchment school if there's space, and then if not you go wherever there is space. I think it is dreadful to present it as a thing you have any choice over. the only choice involved is if you are fortunate enough to be in the position of being able to live in the 'right' area for a good school. It's why houses in good catchments are so sought after.

You will just have to keep waiting on that waiting list. And no, luckily for us mere mortals, there is no way for the 'better classes' to fiddle the system

Yes, petelly, fair point. I think we're talking about slightly different things.

I'm talking about how school places are filled within a system which is designed around giving parents a degree of choice (so that they're not tied to the nearest school if that isn't what they want) and where there is over-subscription in at least some parts of the system. That's when (as far as I can see) you have to require people to apply for places rather than getting them automatically, have to have over-subscription criteria and have to have a date on which this all happens.

How do you suggest the system should cater for those who miss the initial date for applications? Hold places empty in schools? 'Bump' the 30th child in the class to create a vacancy? I'm not being snippy. I really am interested. I could feed any ideas in, next time I'm at a meeting, and they might eventually reach the DCSF.

FWIW, I can see a lot of merit in having a system designed around "local schools for local children" which seems to be what you're describing in the USA. But it does seem to pre-suppose that all schools are equally good and equally able to meet a child's needs and that all parents are happy to send their child to the local school - and, if not, expecting parents to move house to get into the area for a different school seems like a real obstacle for those not easily able to move house.

As for fairness at appeals. If a school misled an appeal panel that is appalling. It is up to the panel to try to establish the truth and whether there is any prejudice to the child to the school. That's why the panel can question all the people appearing before it. But I guess that there's always a risk that people could lie to an appeal panel, just as they can perjure themselves in court. I don't know what the remedy for that is.

it sounds like you are in a tough spot and i sympathise- judgy comments do not help- you are trying to do the best for your kids in difficult circumstances.

i guess you know what the options are, i would echo going to look at the schools that have places, for the time being. by starting them there you do not lose your place in the queue for your preferred school. it may be that a combination of this and a bit of extra tuition will give you what you want.probably worth really thinking about secondary education and planning catchments and stuff for that.

also, if one of the girls is offered a space, bite the bullet and accept, the other may well shoot up the list on grounds of sibling at the school.

hth

madbad the remedy for the appeals panels is not to allow the LA to be judge jury and executioner
simples

eg how about having neighbouring LA hearing each others appeals
big from me as I think about how our LA like to shaft each other don't get on

there are drawbacks in the States where my cousin lives the kids are bussed accross town (and we all know they love their cars so it's hardly a quick trip!) to achieve the right ethnic/financial mix.
I can't see most Ofsted outstanding mothers on here being happy with that (oh and there are no exceptions hence cousins bf keeping her disabled son of school because there is no way he could do an unsupervised 1 hr bus journey at 5 and hence everyone with money sending their children to private school

off

sorry I went to the local state school

sorry patelly didn't see your reply to me

some do have to drive/be bused see my post re my cousin

I'm being punished for being poor
you're being punished for living abroad
others are being punished for being disabled
it can go on as long as you want we're all 'being punished' you presumably had some choice in moving abroad and moving back to where you live now I had presumably much less choice in being poor and others had no choice in being disabled.

Where I am in London your ability to get a school place that would be acceptable (in some cases any place) depends entirely on income that really sucks

The OP has displayed an overwhelming sense of 'entitlement' over and above everyone else to solve her particular problem (IMHO) and I can completely see why myself and others are answering in the way we are, as unquietdad says people (generally) don't want choice they want what they want and they want it for themselves over and above the next person.

So you want school places kept for you incase you decide to move country I want them for me. The mothers of twins want (generally) to be able to send both their children to the first school on their list if they happen to be child 30 and 31 (it would be pretty easy to specify otherwise on the application form)

Oh and as I said we're in London with no LA school at all

1dilemma you may be interested to know that i'm a governor of my local primary school. We have just amended our admissions policy so that in the event of one twin being allocated a place as child 30 we will also give a place to the other twin provided that it does not lead to the toatal no. of children in the school exceeding our permitted maximum. Now that's a step forward for common sense and is going to benefit a family just moving to the area who would otherwise have had to make other arrangements for one or both twins.

Well, as others have said, it's something you needed to think through before. Before going private you needed to work out if you could afford 4x school fees from 3-18 and then university fees on top.

If you can't be sure that you can afford it you need to understand what the back up positions are, in the knowledge that all of the more "desirable" state schools will be full.

That doesn't make the system right or fair, and it's particularly hard on parents with school age children who have to relocate for family or job-related reasons. But we just need to deal with reality as it is and factor it in.

I'm not aware of any way of beating the system, other than finding religion, but you're way too late for that. So I guess the options are:

1. Home educate
2. Cope with the state schools and supplement with after-school activities or tutoring
3. Go private again

Good luck with it all

I moved house mid year and initally found that all the local schools were full. My DD is in a particularly full year group.

I was very nice to all of the office staff when enquiring and a few days later, one of the schools phoned me back to say that they had a child leaving and did I want the space? So it worked out OK in the end. I didn't have a choice of school (and initially it wasnn't my first choice) but luckily for me it turned out to be a very good plce to send my DD and she loved it there.

DS1 now attends this school and I did have a 'choice' for him as I actually went through the applicatiob process.

Schools are more than SATs results and Ofsted reports. I think you should visit some of these 'poor' schools and see for yourself.

I think this is why it is worth thinking of the long term before choosing a school for your first child when they are five. My DS went to a private school nursery. He loved the school and we would like to have kept him there. However we had 2 children and knew we couldn't afford 2 lots of fees so we put him down for a good state school at five and he got in. Second child now has a sibling place. If we had stayed in the private sector we would not have been able to easily switch from private to good state school after age 5 due to the good state school being oversubscribed. I think it is important to be realistic about the financial side of private schooling before embarking on it.

I think one has to accept that if you move house or change from private to state, go abroad with work or whatever that you can not just slot back into your first choice of state school. Ideally state schools need to have their places full all the time so they don't lose out on funding. Many people don't get any of their choices of school even if they put their DCs down at 5..they are the people for whom the system is most unfair.

30 children is quite enough in a class. If you had your children in a class of 30 I doubt you would want others joining.

We would ideally like to move to a bigger house but are resigned to the fact we will need to stay in our not so big house for a few more years till one DC gets into the good secondary school.

If we move to another part of the country through work we would expect to have names on the waiting list rather than places at a good state school. We would probably have to pay out for private until places came up.

If you have 4 DCs maybe it would be cheaper to move near a good state school than to continue to pay for private ed.

In Edinburgh one of the "good" schools had agreed a year one intake of 90 pupils and due to class size, facilities, teacher and support staff numbers etc had rejected other applications as they would increase numbers to a level that would be "detrimental to the educational well-being of all pupils"

One set of parents who chose to take their children out of their private education, made a legal challenge to the decision and won. As a result the school has been faced with a barrage of appeals and it now has 111 year one pupils.

Those parents whose children already attended the school are vociferous in their claims that the education has deteriorated massively - they have several composite classes teaching 2 years together, there are serious logistical problems about play areas, PE, access to equipment for science and music and the teachers are struggling to give the pupils the attention they would like. It is now not the "good" school that the pushy parent desired.

The OP may think that she is benefiting her children by pushing to get them into her preferred school, but she should also think of the wider consequences.

As others have said, the OP does have several choices. Some other parents have none.

Another thought, quite often the 'poorly' regarded schools quite often have small class sizes...

OP - you will not get advice from the LEA or Council on how to get into a better school, but if you approach the school directly they may have some discretion, and be able to bend the rules because only in KS1 are the class numbers are not restricted to 30. I know someone with a son who was gifted in maths, but not getting good teaching in a poor performing school who approached other schools directly NOT through the LEA and was able to get him into a better school by talking directly to the Head Teacher. So if you can't get results going through the LEA, see what you can do to go around them.

Fossie, you haven't answered, have you actually had a look at the "poor" schools? You might find they're not so bad, and could get better with more bright children and supportive parents. Personally I would rather do that and give them extra support at home if necessary, than home educate.

What Riven said. Fossie, there is no reason on earth to think that if your kids are "bright" (I assume you mean of above average academic ability) that they will fail to achieve their full potential at a school where the majority of pupils are not. You might have cause for concern if your children were average-ability "plodders" who would require a great deal of support to achieve level 5 at KS2, for example.

We won an appeal for my 13 year old DS to join a very popular and over-subscribed comprehensive school when we moved a few months ago. We had to write a detailed 3 page letter in support of our appeal and we had to attend an appeals panel and give a half-hour presentation to 6 people stating our case.

DS is very shy and had been badly bullied for being a "posh geek" at his previous state school. We argued that he needed a school which had high academic standards and excellent pastoral care, and provided letters in support of his application from his GP and from the anti-bullying charity Kidscape (where he'd attended an anti-bullying workshop) stating that his mental health had been adversely affected by his experiences.

We argued that he needed a very local school because he a) was phobic about using public tranport on his own after being attacked on the bus while travelling to his previous school, b) we are a non-driving/car-owning family) c) he finds it hard to make friends, we had just moved to the city and it was important he went to a school where he would hook up with kids who live locally.

We said we would home-ed if he wasn't offered a place at this particular school.

We stressed that DS's interests and abilities were in line with the academic specialisms and after-school activities offered by the school.

We discovered the exact number of pupil figures for each year group over the previous 5 years, and pointed out that they had in fact been able to admit more than the stated limit of pupils per year without adverse affects on Health and Safety, or on the school's academic results.

We visited the school with DS and had an interview with the headmaster prior to our application. We followed up the visit with an email AND a letter to the headmaster thanking him for his time, expressing our admiration of the school, our intention to apply for a place and offering to assist with extra-curricular activities.

We phoned the school admissions officer on a daily basis to check progress of our application and basically made bloody nuisances of ourselves.

We won. But please be aware of how very very difficult it is to win admission appeals. It is an exhausting procedure and is designed to make sure that only the most deserving cases (and even then, sadly, often only those with the most tenacious and well-informed parents) get through.

From 1dilemma - "madbad the remedy for the appeals panels is not to allow the LA to be judge jury and executioner ... simples ... eg how about having neighbouring LA hearing each others appeals"

I'm interested in this. In our area (and I assume all others) the appeals are administered by Democratic Services, the people who run polling stations etc, and not by the LEA. Do you think that the fact that admission panel members are school governors - volunteers who don't get paid and spend a lot of their governing time (metaphorically) biting the (metaphorical) heels of the LEA - still doesn't make them independent enough? What about the loss of local knowledge (as we have our ears to the ground, we might detect when a school was attempting to hoodwink us) if appeals were transferred to another borough - would that matter?

From fortyplus - "1dilemma you may be interested to know that i'm a governor of my local primary school. We have just amended our admissions policy so that in the event of one twin being allocated a place as child 30 we will also give a place to the other twin provided that it does not lead to the toatal no. of children in the school exceeding our permitted maximum."

But how does that work? Isn't the whole problem that if twin 1 is pupil number 30, twin 2 is going to be pupil 31 and the KS1 class size limit is set at 30? So isn't this just an empty promise? Or does pupil 29 get "bumped" in order to provide a vacancy? Or do you rely on someone dropping out before the start of term to bring the numbers down to 30 again? I can see how this could work for casual admissions and/or for KS2, but I can't get my head around how it work work for YR entry.

What exactly is a poor school?

The school my DTS attend was suppose to be undesirable and when I went to look around it, I knew that it was exactly where I wanted to send them because of the teachers, the ambience and the commitment of parents who were working together to help improve it to meet Ofsteds exacting requirements. This year, we had more applicants than places avaialble and shock horror, we even had formerly privately educated children join the school

Schools are not just about SAT results and whether the intake is of the right type of social demographics. Send your DC to the poor school (what ever that means), and get involved in helping to raise standards (if that is what is needed) instead of passing judgement which is based on ignorance, prejudice and fallacy because it is obvious that you have not even visited the schools in question.

1dilemma:

Poor people lose out in every system. I don't see that the UK system benefits the poor or disabled in any way. The US system is not perfect either(especially the ways it's funded) but the US is also far more socially divided geographically than the UK (ie poor and rich areas tend to be further away) so UK catchments could, on the whole, have a wider mix of children.

TBH, the school we were allocated isn't half as bad as we thought. Partly because they have so many kids on free school meals, they have lots more funding than any of the other schools we saw.

Regarding choice, my kids were born abroad. I came back to the UK following a job offer. I'm not sure I would have if I would have known the problems we have with schools.

MBW:

I think the appeals for LA controlled schools are done better but VA schools don't have a clue what they're doing and are much more invested in winning than the LA.

I wouldn't discount any school on the premise that you expected dd to achieve level 5s at end of ks2 tbh. 5s across the board aren't exceptional by any means and a good 15 - 20% achieve them every year at the pretty bog standard primary my older children attended.
My youngest dd attends a school in a deprived area (first choice because of statement priority) the resources are fantastic, the teachers dedicated and considering where the children start their results are outstanding.
I wouldn't have thought of looking at it purely because of the area. I went on recommendation, looked and realised it was a gem.Dd is well on course to get 3's next year.
I think you need to look at all the schools before dismissing them as poor tbh, OFSTED reports and SATs results aren't the whole picture. Chat to parents of the children there would be my tip to get a good feel for the school.

The question seems to be when is a full school full? There's a report in today's Times of a High Court decision - mother has won the right to a fresh appeal to the school of her choice - she didn't want her dd to go to the school she was allocated due to local crime problems. The school she wanted had stated that it was full. So what happens when everyone wants to appeal on the basis of fear of local crime?

Our local massively over-subscribed primary had to admit a second reception class (housed in a portacabin) in ds1's year because there were no free places in any of the town's schools. Apparently there were angry scenes between parents who were convinced they would have got in on the original allocation, and those who had got an "extra" place!

To clarify, the nearest school which might have a place I did visit and did not like. It particular I did not like the headteacher and I think her influence on the school was not good. It is also a very big school. We went down the private school route to start with as DD1 was so shy she would not speak unless with family or very good friends. She is much better now but I am wary of going backwards with her confidence. The other schools are much further away and I still have a school run for my son that ties me to this area. Does that fact I have a child already in another school and therefore distance from school to complete 2 schools runs make a difference? Can I use this in an appeal? Perhaps if you have some knowledge of appeals or have been through one yourself I would have more help than those who just want to tell me to 'suck it up'. Thanks MrsFlittersnoop, yours comments are helpful.

Fossie, I see you are in Croydon - so am I.

If your ds is at a boys' school in this borough I assume you are in the southern end of Croydon. Most of the schools in the south of the borough aren't that bad - it is really in the north of the borough and around Thornton Heath that they aren't so good.

What was it you didn't like about the headteacher? How big is the school? 90? That's not as bad as you think.

Have you been offered a place anywhere?