Phone call to offer a reception place hours before the appeal today

[stuartr]

I have just received a phone call from my local admissions administrator at the council, offering my child a place at our chosen school.

We were due to have the appeal at 12 noon today.

The lady who called me said it was very very rare she made this type of call and and the headteacher had allocated more spaces at the school.

they had sent me all sorts of documentation which made me think i had no chance of winning my appeal, so i consider my child very lucky as she was 8th on the waiting list.

To cut a long story short we needed our child to attend this school due to childcare reasons and the fact that both my wife and i work in Newcastle and we live in Middlesbrough, our full time childcare is in Stockton 10 miles away.

My child had been allocated the local school which is 100 yards from our house but we would have had no way of getting her to school if the appeal failed.

I think they have only read our appeal letter today when they have met.

I had fully expected to be turned down and thought we had no chance as the intake for reception was 3 classes of 25 and there were over a 100 applications.

I am obviously elated at this moment but boy did they leave it late to tell me a phone call 2 hours before we were due to meet.

Has this happened to anyone else.

Yours a quite stunned father

Great news

Brilliant!

Congratulations

They might have been working their way through the others who turned down, I got a secondary school space 2 days before my appeal. For the previous week I had been following this space as it was offered to various children who didn't want it. It came with 50m during that time.

Or it might have just come up. One of the experts said they had a place come up in the middle of a hearing once.

thats great!

Great news! We're still waiting for an appeal date - I really hope they come up with something before then though, as the LEA said the appeal could be held any time between now and the end of August... term starts on 30th August

I may be wrong but 3 classes of 25 is an unusual configuration. Most have a Published Admissions Number (e.g., the max they can take) that is a multiple of 30, don't they? e.g., 30 kids in each class.

Glad you got your place.

Me getting things slightly muddled there, I think.

What I meant was schools can admit 30 primary children per class without contravening the regulations on infant class size. If a school had said they were originally going to admit 3 x 25 kids that would give a 'Published admissions number' of 75. If they went and admitted over their PAN they could still stay within the class size regulations.

What's not allowed is to have a PAN of (say) 90, admit only 75 children, and 'save' 15 places for children to get in on appeal IIRC.

If you're interested. Which you're probably not TBH!

This is what the letter said about capacity at the school.

The indicated number from the net capacity assessment for school is 75 for Reception split over 3 classes.

There will be 3 Reception classes with 25 pupils and a full time teacher in each, In addition there will be 2 full time assistants.

There is no additional classroom space to accommodate anymore children.There is one allocated child who requires 1 on 1 support at all times.

i do appreciate your reply, I am stil a little bewildered by what is a good decision but , I did find the call a littlebazzare this morning, i had to ring them back to doublecheck it was for real

That's amazing. I have an appeal for our catchment school 3rd July and hope the same happens for us, doubt it though, my son hasn't even been allocated elsewhere, our lea is pants.

narmada our Infant school has a Pan of 75. The Reception classes are 25 children each. However the KS1 classes are 5 x 30 mixed classes, so appeals are treated as ICS appeals because of prejudice to future classes, ie it would increase class sizes the following year which would be illegal.

I think this is quite a normal set up.

got to say i am still shocked, didn't think i had even a %1 chance today.

They had sent me paperwork indicating it was an ICS appeal but the lady on the phone said it wasn't .

It was non class size related.

wow, well done. We had our appeal meeting this morning and will know in a week. Great that you didn't need to go through with all of that!

narmada 75 would work with 2 x 30 and 1x15 so would still be acceptable as a multiple of 30 surely. I agree unusual but on here Ive seen far worse :)

Your appeal almost certainly would have been an infant class size regs case and I can only assume that the LA has made a decision to take in 90 into reception year, which is OK this year but is going to cause problems in subsequent years unless they get some more classrooms in quickly. Incidently the head teacher would not have made the decision, it was the LA assuming it was a community school, in conjunction with the head teacher and governing body.

I actually find this sort of behaviour very annoying by the LA, they have known they had a problem at the school over numbers since April or before, why did it take till the back end of June to decide to do something.

I note that you had a phone call two hours before the appeal. OK sometimes a place does become available and it was me who actually sat on an appeal when it happened half way through the appeal. But have the LA confirmed this place by email? They really should have.

Sorry I am being negative when you are actually jumping around with joy but experience says be careful.

Wow! Congratulations, if it came down to it I would happily sit in front of the panel, fully prepared for my appeal, for them to tell me I didn't have to as I had a place. Stuff of dreams! :) x

Actually xxalkxx that would have been a far better way of doing it. To have got everybody together at appeal and confirm in front of the appeal panel what was going to happen.

still think it could have been handled better