Rejected my sons place offer for September, what happens now?

[PoppyPia]

We were allocated a terrible primary school miles away earlier this month for reception, I have thought about it and there's no way I can send my son there, so I have rejected the offer. What happens now?

God this thread is DISGUSTING. All these people licking their lips in glee over the OPs predicament...absolutely horrid.

Really, Neo? I don't detect glee, but I do detect a string sense of bafflement that anyone could launch into the school application process holding a lot of assumptions that could fairly easily have been checked out and which turn out to be pretty disastrously wrong.

Err, strong sense of bafflement.

What a weird post, neo. I think you would have to be superhuman not wonder why the OP didn't actually read the guidance notes that came with the primary school application form, but there has been no glee- and loads of helpful advice.

Seeker it's no weirder than the ruck of people harrying the op with questions....it's like the third inquisition! There is at least one deleted post where someone's insulted her...someone called her an idiot. It's horrible.

As for phonics it is not the be all and end all. My DD1 went to a prep for the first three years of her education and they never used any phonics at all. She's one of the strongest readers in her year 4 class now. In the top ten percent.

PoppyPia, I sympathise, I am also from a country were you just get your local primary and if there are too many children for one class, they just change provision to offer two classes with a smaller number of children than the maximum! The way it works here is quite mind boggling, to be honest.

We were lucky in that we could make two separate applications to two different LEA in our and in the neighbouring borough, as we were living on the border of one, so effectively had applied to 10 schools across two boroughs! We did not get any of our choices in our "home borough", and were really pleased to get a lovely RC primary in the neighbouring borough.

Poppy

Just get his name on the list of every school you can manage

Hold your nerve and hope for the best

There has been LOADS of comings and goings in both my DS and DDs primary classes. With luck something will come through by September or January.

If you can bear it, go and look around the allocated school - reputations precede places, and are often unfounded. You may be pleasantly surprised. The school's ethos is way more important than if it is - in your words - "a rough area". If it is 5 miles away the LEA will be obliged to provide transport. You can keep his name on all the waiting lists.

PoppyPia Mon 06-May-13 19:33:10

"I naively assumed that when I wa told I had a choice it meant I had a choice.

I was educated in a country where everyone automatically had a place at their local school, I assumed this would be the situation here. I now know I was wrong."

The problem is these two premises are not actually compatible. Either you have a choice- which means that other parents also have a choice, which means they can come to your local school and fill it up if you don't- or else everybody just goes to their local school.

What you half subconsciously expected was a combination of the two, where you and every other parent would have the choice to go elsewhere, but where the local school would also keep free places for every single local parent who hadn't applied, just in case they changed their mind at the start of term. In other words, you expected two places to be available to your child and not filled by anybody else until the start of term.

If you think about it, that would be totally unworkable: what would they do with all these empty places and the teachers they had employed to teach these children who might just decide to turn up? Who would pay the salaries of teachers with no children to teach?

You have a choice to state a preference, but a good school is like any other goods in limited supply: you have a choice of cheese or ham sandwiches until the ham runs out, and after that you have a choice of cheese. No cafe organises their preparations in such a way as to have a full supply of everything at closing time: the aim is to sell out insofar as possible but not to have to totally turn customers away.

I would echo the advice of other posters: go and look at the school you feel is so bad. Is it really such an unpleasant place on closer inspection? Are you sure it is a disadvantage that many of the children are not British?

OP - to add to your "to do list" - can you check with local private schools if there is any help to parents with below a certain income level? It could be that you qualify for some help.

Where we live, most preps are around £12k a year, and a full time nursery place is over £1k a month so on the face of it, private education is cheaper, however - that's only for term times and school hours, you do need to budget for any wrap around care (although private schools tend to be much better at providing it on site than state) and holiday care.

however, I would call the LEA and say you rejected the place by mistake so would like to be reinstated, that gives you some breathing room until January. Then ask about transport - don't think that means they'd pay for your 5 year old to go on a normal bus alone and you'd have to accompany them, round here that means they would be collected from your house/your childminder's house and returned in a taxi, driven by someone CRB checked. Worth finding out. It might be possible, even if it's just for one school year while you get a place somewhere closer.

Stella, it would come with a huge health warning on the bottom, saying that this is not an offer of a place just a prediction.

I can't see that it would be that tricky to generate using an online form: boxes for postcode, sibling, faith and other admissions criteria.

I also agree that the council should hold information sessions.

How on earth would the council know who would qualify for a faith place?

How would they know how many children live in their borough?

How would they know who is moving house? Or going private? Or choosing HE? Or likely to secure a place outside the borough?

How many staff would be needed to process the (incomplete) information and how would they pay for it? It would in effect be a dry run of the whole process, with only a fraction of applications in, at the time they'd be doing secondary applications for real.

Does you council not produce allocation statements for all the schools Branching? Mine puts on their website details of the intake number for each school, if it was oversubscribed, how many places went to each category (lac, siblings, faith) and what the furthest distance offered was.

From looking at that I can see I would almost certainly get a place in school X (undersubscribed) and school Y (furthest distance 800m, I live 400m away) but probably wouldn't get a place in school Z (furthest distance 300m, I live 500m). Can also see there is a faith school near by, but only half the admitted children were baptised in that faith so we might have a chance there too.

They list all the furthest distances from the last few years too so I can see how much they have changed, if they are likely to get bigger or smaller.

Ours is just done by postcode, so your postcode generates a list of catchment/local schools. Faith schools have their own criteria.

But its very easy to phone the council and give them.your address, they then look at distance as the crow flies and tell you your nearest schools and others where you may get a place on distance.

The information we were given by the council was very clear on how the ststem works, but perhaos not all councils are? Tho surely they have to be ot they leave themselves open to appeals?

Misinformation comez from heresay ie a mum i know was quite insistent that as her sister works at a school that she coukd get her a place, despite it being miles out of her catchment and heavily oversubscribed. I and another mum told her this wasnt the case but she was quite sure her sister would be able to get her a place!

This is really sad to read, as the OP won't be the only one affected. Yes, she probably should have put down her local, C of E school on the form - but maybe she actually put down 5 schools that she, historically had a better chance at? (Quite possibly not).

I have a friend who lives in Brighton, and was looking to move house. They found a lovely house, so looked into schools (2 preschool DDs).

If they were Catholic, they should get into the local Catholic school. Places not normally offered to non Catholics.

If CofE, they should get into the local CofE school. Places not normally offered to non CofEs.

They are neither Catholic or CofE. But the nearest non denominational school was only about 3/4 mile away, so still close. However, that was about 1/4 mile too far away to have a chance of getting a space.

Schools further away, would generally expect to be filled with children living more locally. Nearest school with a realistic chance of getting a place was miles away, and 'poor'.

They didn't buy the house.

But it just shows that there are some areas where there is no 'safe', local option to choose.

OP - There is lots of good advice on this thread. And many, many people make assumptions about how the admissions system works, and get it wrong. I agree that you should ask for your place back, as a last resort (it doesn't affect your application to any other schools, and you may need it, even if very short term). Then fully research all your other options, and get him on the waiting list of every school that you see as 'better' than the one offered.

tiggytape Tue 07-May-13 09:22:16
You are quoting my:

"We were lucky in that we could make two separate applications to two different LEA in our and in the neighbouring borough, as we were living on the border of one, so effectively had applied to 10 schools across two boroughs"

And you reply:

Living on the border doesn't mean you get to apply to 2 LAs and get double the number of school applications as everyone else. ....

It was possible then, my son is now in Y6. I should have specified.
Now it is all centralized into one application form.

Back then the deadlines were different, and we even got the results on different dates!

tiggytape No, it used to be the case until very recently (about 3/4 years ago) that you could apply separately to different London boroughs. They now have a single pan-London application process, but that's a relatively recent thing. I think that's what Quint is talking about - a clue is that she's talking about 5 places in each borough, which used to be the case, whereas in the Pan-London scheme you can apply for 6 places.

PoppyPia - so sorry that you've been caught out by differences between the English and your home education systems - are you from Australia by any chance, as what you said is certainly what one of my friends from there says?

The system does seem to be designed to maximise stress, although as you say, some kids don't have offers at all, so the major problem is lack of capacity in the borough as a whole.

Fingers crossed that you get something sorted asap following the wise advice others have already offered. It might take a while, I gather, but try to keep your nerve and do all the things you've talked about re. nursery, private schools and waiting lists.

x-posts Quint :)

But you explained it better than me, thanks!

tiggy I didn't realise there were so many other changes. It doesn't help people avoid getting confused and making mistakes as a result, does it?

Hope you're feeling okay Poppy.

Poppy, if it makes you feel any better, a (highly intelligent) friend of mine found that she had no secondary school place at all offered for her daughter.

Although she was at a feeder school for the secondary just 1/4 mile away, and had put down the next nearest school as backup, they were over the county boundary. They should therefore have applied through the other county system, even though they were too far away to be granted a place in any of their secondaries, going on past years. So neither LA had the responsibility for offering a place at all, as their application was just dismissed.

None of us knew that detail -- the secondary had just said it would be fine, they'd had children from that village before.

So, I can quite see that if you think it'll be fine, you tend not to check all the small print...

Was that recently Tingalingle? I was under the impression that applications to schools in another county had to be made to the LA you lived in, not the LA the school was in.

I do think some admissions booklets could be made a bit clearer though. It would probably be worth adding that you do need to make an application to your catchment school if you want a place there and giving the advice that you should have a school you have a chance to get into somewhere on your list.