Place offered & school appeal has been cancelled

[onetiredmummy]

I've posted a couple of times about a term time change of school for my Year 4 DS & had some great advice on here.

My appeal was supposed to be this week but I had a phone call on Friday to say a place was available so I grabbed it with both hands :) Appeal is cancelled. Am I to assume that a place did suddenly appear or that they were so fed up with my extensive appeal paperwork they gave me a place to shut me up

Many thanks to everyone who helps on these school appeal threads, you really do make a difference to parents who haven't done it before & who flounder through lack of knowledge.

I had a place offer the Friday before my appeal for a secondary school place for DS1 a few years ago. It happens.

It was lovely waking up on what should have been the appeal morning!

Any properly organised LA will want to minimise the number of appeals that have to be heard.

Islington have been working to reduce the number of appeals through the dual route of school improvement and speeding up turn around at admissions, with the result that last year the number of appeals was down, and they hope will be further down this year. A good result all around.
(Of course schools are improved for much more important reasons than saving on appeals.....(!) )

I once got offered a place on the Friday before appeals started. We actually hadn't appealed, but I wouldn't be surprised if the LA puts more staff in the office just before appeals to make sure all rejected places have been processed and re-offered before the appeals start.

In fact, although we were appealing, the place I was offered I'd been tracking for a week as they went through their waiting list which included several friends, all of whom had already accepted first choices.