Primary school appeal- advice please

[Rach445]

Hi,
I recently moved house within the same LA , when I moved I tried to change school for my 3 children to the new local one opposite our house, 2 of my children got a place and 1 didn't due to no Space ..... She is no1 on the waiting list for a place at school but it's been 6 weeks of doing two school runs and she is getting very distressed and the school run us a nightmare as the old school is 10 miles away ..... So I decided to go to appeal and I'm now awaiting my hearing date.
What do you think my chances are ? And what actually happens at appeal please? Thank you.

What year is your child who did not get a place? On what basis did you appeal?

I posted a detailed response to your post on the "any tips..." thread.

Thanks.
My daughter is in reception and I went on any reasonable la would not (option c)

This is all new and quiet alien to me!!!

Im sorry but if the class is full you wont get a place, even at appeal, you need to wait untll a place opens up eg someone moves from the school.

You can get an "excepted" place-I did, but only really if the LA made an error. Have you been offered a place at a nearer school? If so, and you refused then there are really no grounds for appeal, travel difficulties don't count. If there are no places at nearer schools, you might have a case, as it might be considered unreasonable to travel 10 miles to the nearest school.

The fact that your daughter is in reception year makes it more difficult potentially. It will depend on whether the classes in the school have 30 pupils in them or not. So the first question is how many pupils are there in the reception year and what is the class room organisation. If the published admission number (PAN) is 30, then there will almost certainly be just the one class with 30 reception pupils in it. The maximum number of infant pupils that can be with one school teacher is 30 and is called the infant class size regulations. So a school with a PAN of 15,30, 45,60 etc will almost certainly fall under that legislation.
Unfortunately there are very specific rules around allowing extra pupils into infant classes with 30 pupils in them and I am afraid the difficulty of getting pupils to two different schools is not one of the admissible reasons. I am afraid that any reasonable LA would not do this is also very unlikely to succeed because the legal definition of unreasonable is completely perverse not what you consider not fair or reasonable.
I would however definitely appeal because you have nothing to loose and something may come out at the appeal which tips the decision in your favour. Your kind of appeal is one that appeal panels hate, because they realise that the sensible thing is to admit, with two other siblings in the school, but legally they are unable to admit because of the restrictions of the infant class size regs.