Info from the school for use in appeal?

[MDM]

Does anyone know whether a school is obliged to provide you with information such as: where is my child on the waiting list, how many siblings did you take, how far from the school does the last child live etc etc?
In other words, I'm trying to work out whether it's worth appealing. I don't want to waste anyone's time or the ed authority's money if we have little chance of a spot.

I don't think the school has that sort of information. It's the local authority who would have it.

Have a look on Your LA's website -ours publishes this list every year, which has a lot of the information you need. It doesn't include your position on the waiting list, of course, but you should be able to get that from the LA too.

Our LA said that they wouldn't give the info (ie the position on the waiting list) out, and that basically we just need to sit and wait!

Wait until when though? Presumably, it's because they haven't received all the acceptances back so cannot create a waiting list.

So I've found out that DD is first on the waiting list for our preferred school. There are 30 in the class already and two appeals pending (one of which is our basic response saying that we intend to appeal but that we will submit the 'details' of the appeal as soon as we're ready.

We're fifth in line for our second choice. They only take 20 each year.

So from what I can gather, we can appeal for school 1 only if we think there has been an error etc etc. ?

I'm not sure tiggytape. I'm trying to get hold of the LEA to get more info. They keep passing me back to the school, which them passes me back to the LEA.

Anyone else had this problem? So frustrating!

Is the school a community school? If so then the admission authority is the LA and the LA admissions office should be handling these kind of enquiries. I would be tempted to preface your next request by email, with I need this information to enable me to write my appeal form and if I can not have this information then I will have to inform the appeal panel that I have stopped from mounting an appropriate appeal by the lack of information supplied by the LA.
If however it is foundation school or an academy the email should go to the school.

Thanks admission. Yes it's a community school. I'm going to try the email route, at least then it's all documented too. Great idea for the preface - nice wording.