Secondary School Entry 2020

[janed38]

We will be returning to the UK shortly to live in Washington. My daughter in September will start secondary school in year 7. Having applied to the local authority we are very disappointed that they can only offer a place in a Washington School with a very poor Ofsted report.
Are there any recommendations for a good secondary school that will have places ? We will of course consider schools in areas close such as Sunderland, Chester Le Street etc.
Any suggestions ?

unfortunately you have picked pretty much the worst possible time in terms of your daughter's age for making this move. you would have this outcome for most places in the uk except for extremely underpopulated areas. school applications are submitted the previous winter, with each application listing their 3 favourite schools, and allocations are made and results communicated in Spring. By this point in the year, any shuffling from appeals etc should have been completed and generally the only schools with any spaces will be the least popular ones. do you have to move to this specific area? do you have to return to the uk right now or could it be postponed a couple of years? could you consider a private school?

if this has to happen then don't despair. Ofsted ratings are not the ultimate authority on good quality and some of their assessment priorities don't always align with parent priorities so it is possible to have a school which Ofsted rates poorly but has lots of kids and parents who actually like it. equally the reverse can also be true when Ofsted rate a school highly. any other year I would suggest you visit the school and make up your own mind but obviously that isn't possible this year.

There is often a little flurry of swap-arounds in the first couple of weeks of term. not huge, no more than one or two places per school but sometimes a parent will have left it right till the last minute to decide between a state school offer or a private offer, or will have had to move to the other end of the country for work, and a school only finds out they have a spare space in the first week of September. each oversubscribed school has a waiting list and they will offer the spare space in priority order until they find a family willing to make a last-minute change (and lots will turn down the offer as a last-minute change is so unsettling). the waiting lists are done according to the school's entry criteria, so if you move to a house right next door to a popular oversubscribed school, you will be right at the top of that waiting list despite having applied months after the other people on the list.

Thanks for the helpful comments. I do understand the process, we have had to move at this point in time following the events of 2020.

I sympathise. it must be a very difficult situation.

with a quick look at the government league tables site (and zero experience of the area) the school I would be looking at would be Oxclose Community Academy if you need to be in Washington. you won't get a place immediately assuming it is currently full but you may be lucky if you are willing for your dd to move there after the start of y7 as and when a place becomes available. if you can be a bit flexible in location then schools in Gatehead generally seem better.