A quick question for appeals people :)

[blueberryboybait]

We are appealing for DD2's place at DD1's school. When we filled in the application forms you got 1 choice either sibling or religion - siblings came first so we ticked it. When looking at the criteria for deciding which siblings get a place (criterion 6) it says the following :

If the school is oversubscribed in criterion 6 (siblings outside catchment) then criterion 7 (regular church attendance) will be used as the determining factor. In all other oversubscribed criteria if the school is oversubscribed within any category above, the straight- line distance from the child’s home address to the school will be used as the determining factor. Distances will be measured according to the Ordnance Survey eastings and northings for the child’s home address and the school. Those living closer to the school will be given priority.
If two or more children with the same priority for admission, live an indistinguishable distance from the school, but cannot be admitted, then the available places will be decided by the casting of lots.

We are going in with the fact that we never had the option to add our weekly church attendance to the form, we let the school know but admissions told us one or the other. But with the paragraph above. with religion being a deciding factor within the siblings out of catchment, we would have come above quite a few of those awarded a place.

Would this been seen as a valid point for appeal?

Excuse the bad typing and spelling - fat fingers!

I have to say I don't understand how your application form worked. I have never come across one that required you to make a choice like this. It may be that admissions gave you poor advice but, unless you got it in writing, that would be difficult to prove.

I suspect the school had a supplementary form that you failed to complete. That is normally required for any school admitting on faith grounds.

If you can prove you were given incorrect advice you may have a case. If it is really true that the LA requires you to choose between applying for sibling priority or applying on faith grounds you would have a case but I would be very surprised if the LA really requires such a choice. I'm afraid that if you were given incorrect advice on the phone you are unlikely to win an appeal. The appeal panel will take the view that you cannot prove you were given incorrect advice and it is your responsibility to apply correctly.

If you would like to identify the school and LA involved I will take a look and see if there really is a problem with their application process. PM me if you don't want to post that information publicly.

It was all online and once you ticked the sibling box all other choices became un-tickable. According to school, supplementary form is only sent out if you tick faith grounds.

Will PM you the link for our admissions info.

Thank you.

Fascinating.

There is no mention in the school's admission criteria of a supplementary information form. They say they will request confirmation of attendance but don't say how you tell them who to contact.

The paper form does not have a sibling box. If the online form had such a box and greyed out other options when it was ticked that sounds like a clear defect. Unfortunately the online form is no longer available so your big problem will be proving it behaved like that. If they didn't admit any children from category 6 it is all irrelevant as this hasn't cost your child a place. If they did admit from that category you certainly have a case that the admission criteria were unclear and were not correctly implemented.

The big question will be whether the panel believe the LA messed up the online form. If you are the only parent complaining about this and the LA insist the form allowed you to select both sibling and faith options you may struggle to convince the panel. However, if the LA admit the form required you to make a choice or there are other parents making the same complaint the panel may well accept that the LA got it wrong. In that case it is down to whether or not your child would have got a place but for this error.

Thank you so much, yes children got in under category 6 and it was a big complaint that only one box could be ticked. We will take it to panel and see what happens.

There is clearly a mistake by someone here. If the admission form says you have to chose between church or sibling then if you choose sibling the admission criteria is clear that they will then give priority to regular church attendance. As such you should have had to complete the supplementary application form. Normally that form is on the website and it is for the applicant to complete it and send it back. It is usually stated quite specifically that it is the applicants responsibility and if they do not return by the cut off date then it will not be taken into consideration. The question here is whether that was what happened or not. If it did and you did not fill the form in, then it is your fault and your priority would not have existed. If however it is clearly stated that the school will send the form out to applicants then that was a fault and you have been disadvantaged.

If there was no ability to show your church attendance, how did the school put you in any admission criteria order? I am assuming that they used distance, which brings the question back to why they used church attendance when in every other category it was distance.

Your problem is that the panel may well agree with you that there is a fault but if there are a good number of people in the same position as you then the fault does not mean you get given a place. Firstly there is the question of how many are appealing who have been similarly disadvantaged. The admission authority / panel will need to reconstruct the admissions with the fault corrected and see how many people were disadvantaged in that they would have been given a place if it had been applied correctly. You might still not have got a place. Then there is the question of how many there are. So if there was only one person - you - who met the above then admitting 1 over what could be an admission number of 30 would not be an issue but if there were 10 then no panel is going to admit 10 extra to a single class. The outcome then becomes how many do the panel think they can admit or can the admission authority and school come to some arrangement that they can admit all those that have been disadvantaged.

A question: how would they know how many had been affected? They would be relying on information (church attendance) which they had not (through their own fault) collected. Would they only count people who appealed? Or would they go to some effort to contact all those with siblings to ask if they had also attended church?

Seems like an almighty Mess up some where. How can they use faith to decide if you can't submit the info ?!??

spindela, the answer is that they will look at the revised order with everybody on it to determine who should have got places but they are only going to get involved in those that appealed.

Just a quick update and a HUGE thanks to prh47bridge for your advice, we had our appeal this morning and have just had the call to say our appeal has been upheld, DD will go to school with her sister. We are the only 1 out of the 5 appeals that has been upheld as others were purely on a sibling/logistical base.

Excellent news. Well done.