Primary School Allocation Appeal Grounds

[onehellofaride]

can anyone give any advice on things to raise/not raise at an appeal hearing for a primary school? We havejust found out today that the reallocation for my son has not been successful and therefore we are planning to appeal but at the minute I'm just staring at the form. My son is currently at the nursery of his preffered school and is very settled there. It has always been a good school and is one which I went to when I was young but he absolutely loves it and it would be awful for him to have to move now.

Sorry if this is vague/nonsense I'm typing it quickly

The first question is whether this is an infant class size appeal. If the school has classes of 30 children in Reception, Y1 or Y2 it will be infant class size. That means you should only succeed if you can show that a mistake has been made and your son should have been admitted, e.g. your son was placed in the wrong admissions category or they got the distance from your home to the school wrong. You can still appeal even if you don't have any evidence of a mistake but you are unlikely to succeed.

If it isn't infant class size it comes down to whether your case that your son needs to attend this school outweighs the school's case that it can't cope with any more pupils. You need to look for features of the school which will be particularly useful for your son and which are missing from the allocated school. Being settled at the nursery there is not good grounds for an appeal unless you can produce expert evidence to show your son will be badly affected by having to go to a different school.