Appeal on Monday for son with no school place at all for 6 months. Help pls!

[badgermama]

Hello lovely folk, all help appreciated. We moved at the end of March this year to an area where all the primary schools are full. The council have been no help and offered no school place so I have had my 5 year old year R son at home for 6 months trying to educate him whilst taking care of his two year old sister. During this time we have gone from no 2 on the waiting list for our catchment school to number 9. The Head told me it would probably be Juniors before he gets a place.

We have an appeal on Monday and any hints would be appreciated. We spoke to the admissions dept at the council today who gave us lots of information I am sure is wrong eg we think he may fit under fair access protocol as he has been unplaced and the council said FAP doesn't apply to secondary. They also said that he had not been out of school for 6 months as it counts per year so he has only been unplaced for one day (?!).

They also said that the council are setting up a room in a school four miles away till Xmas where all the year R and 1 children who are unplaced in the area can go, with no plans for after Xmas. I can't drive due to a visual problem and would struggle to get him there and feel reluctant to put a nervous 5 year old in a taxi. My son is also very able and was taught on his own for much of the time at his last school as his literacy especially was so far in advance of the other 90 children in the year so the thought of him being in a class with possibly mostly younger children concerns me. He used to come home weeping with boredom from the last school and I can't help feeling that stimulation might not be great in this interim holding classroom. The council official also told me they did not have him on their list as unplaced for some reason so had not got him on the list for this temporary classroom set up, I have no idea why they would not class him as unplaced as we have all the documentation in place to show we applied and are unplaced and an appeal date.

I am sorry to ramble. It had been an exhausting year and I really want to do right by my son and feel pretty hopeless about the appeal at the moment.

thank you to anyone who has stuck with this!

Thank you folks.

Jenny that is helpful to know.

Lougle, the letter from the school refusing us states the old legislation too not the updated relaxed legislation by the coalition. They also said they would have had to take another teacher, not true, but even if they did they had an extra teacher in one class at the time already with 32 pupils in it.

The trouble is so much has happened this week. The council have mailed us with information that shows they are breaking the law with such as FAP... and we only got our appeal pack one working day before the appeal so are scrambling with the information.

I suppose we need to calm down. We have been given three subheadings with sub clauses as to how we have to make our argument but that in itself seems unfairly elaborate and intimidating. I know the appeal has to be ordered some way but it's enough to put most people off I think.

I just don't want the panel saying 'well, you didn't say any of this in June in your appeal application' and fobbing us off.

I suppose I need to rely on the knowledge that anyone I explain this to seems horrified and I hope that a panel would be too.

I also can't get our of my head that if they are saying to people (as they told us in writing) that FAP doesn't apply to full classes then are there vulnerable children all over our area being misinformed? As someone who spent her entire working life with vulnerable children that is a very disturbing thought.

I've read this thread with my chin on my chest! You're in an impossibly horrible position.
Can't add much to anything, other than to wish you all the luck in the world on Monday.

lease let us know how it all goes.

They cannot dictate how you present your case or how long you take. That is entirely up to you. At the end of your hearing you may be asked if you have been able to present all your arguments and asked all the questions you want. Don't be afraid to say no if you aren't happy.

That is really useful to know PRH, thank you.

They have scheduled us 15 minutes each for three appellants to present their case. Obviously we can do bullet points but it would be a push to get all of this nonsense across in 15 minutes.

Oh don't worry about that - if it runs over it just means they'll eat their lunch on the hoof!

That's a ridiculously short time for an appeal to be heard.
I present appeals in another part of local government and I would expect about an hour for all arguments and evidence to be heard. Equally, we exchange information packs prior to the hearing where possible. I know on one occasion I was asked if I wished to postpone the hearing as I hadn't been given all the information. given that I was already there and it took months to get a hearing date, I declined

Good luck and don't forget that although members of the panel are lay people, they will have heard a lot of appeals and have a good idea of the relevant legislation. Will there be an independent clerk who can also advise on legal issues? If you don't understand anything, don't be afraid to ask for clarification.

I hope you win but after all this is over, if you can bear to, please consider a complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman who will examine whether the council has breached it's procedures and if you have suffered from maladministration. You will have to exhaust the council's complaints procedure first so it could still be a bit of a battle and I wouldn't blame you for not having the energy for it.

Best of luck on Monday.

Quick question. We know when we applied that the school had 94 pupils. We were told by the head on a tour two months later that they still had 94 pupils and one class has an extra teacher. If when we applied this was the case can they still say it breaches the infant class size limit to take him in the light of the extra teacher?

If that is 90 across Reception, Y1 and Y2 they presumably operate one class in each year. If, say, they have employed an additional teacher for Y1 but your son wants a place in Reception the argument that they would need an extra teacher still applies as admitting your son would take Reception over 30 pupils. It is true that they can work around that by mixing years but they can't be forced to do that, either by the appeal panel or the LA.

Even if the additional teacher is in Reception, there is still the argument that they won't admit from the waiting list until they get back down to 30 in the class, so admitting your son would push that further away. They would need to continue to employ an additional teacher until such time as the total number in the class (excluding excepted children) was down to 30. So they are still entitled to make the argument.

Yet another example of council's incompetence:

"We never wrote to ask for him to be deregistered. I was told if he didn't have a place we had to say he was home educated to meet legal guidelines and I was given a number to call to put his name down for someone to come and see we were meeting his needs."

If you had been offered a place anywhere which you declined, this would be true. But a parent who has requested a school place and has not been offered one has no legal obligation to educate the child while waiting. it is known as a "temporary break in schooling" and you do not have to home educate. (Obviously you'd want to educate him and you did educate him, but legally you didn't have to.)

I think what they really meant was that if they could trick you into saying you were home educating then they could appear to be off the hook. The cheek of actually sending someone round to check you were educating your son properly, when they were meant to be doing it themselves, is astonishing.

Agree Saracen.

No it is 94 in year R accross 3 classes with an extra teacher in one class of 32 with two children coming in and out from a language SEN unit on site.

The children from the language SEN unit are probably excepted. If there are another two excepted children the school only needs 3 teachers. So the interesting question is what is the status of this additional teacher. Do they count as a teacher for the purposes of ICS regulations or are they classed as a trainee, TA, HLTA or similar. Potentially worth exploring in the hearing.

I was told that they were an extra Teacher, not a TA or trainee.

Saracen I agreed to that person coming round as I thought I had no choice and also wanted to do right by my son by making sure I was delivering appropriate and stimulating topics.

I feel like such a chump now.

Is it possible that the extra teacher is linked to the SEN unit so that the two children are covered?

At any rate, I would expect a panel to drill down into the numbers supplied and ask the LA/school what the staffing is - every panel I've sat on have always done that. We do the maths and say 'it appears you have an extra teacher, why is that?' or 'Does the HT/DHT/SENCO/Reading for All teacher have any teaching responsibility?' or 'are any of those teachers NQTs?' We do this mainly for the parent's benefit, because it is usually quite obvious when you look at the figures and are used to looking at them, but it's still good for the school/LA to have to explain their staffing to demonstrate that they don't have capacity.

The problem with all this is that it is a moving target with too many imponderables. Are the 4 above the 90 excepted pupils or not. At least two pupils are allocated to an SEN unit but were they admitted as part of the 90+ at the beginning of reception or have they arrived as excepted pupils at some time in the last academic year. Is the extra teacher actually the teacher in the SEN unit or actually an extra and who is employing them and for what? All these different dynamics alter the possibilities as to the chances of winning the appeal.
The only way to get the bottom of the numbers and what it really means is to get a blow by blow account of all the changes by the LA at the appeal. But on the basis of what has been said about the performance of the LA over this whole shambles you would not bet on them being able to give a cohesive account.

I was told when i met with the head teacher to explain our situation in may that there were 94 in year r across three classes, 2 pupils coming in and out from the language unit and two that they had been instructed to take by the council. She said as a result they had employed another teacher.

I haven't read the full thread yet but wanted to let you know that I had the same issue whwn I moved. All schools are 'full' locally, we were offered one 2.5 miles away and the husband has the car. I complained to the council on the grounds that I applied before moving and 3 weeks before the school place was needed, provided them is enough time to assess that a child will be in need of education imminently.

I appealed... Long story short, I got a call from the independent commissioner for schools or some such title and he offered me a place at my 1st preference school to settle my complaint. He also explained that though a school can be at their allocated capacity, they DO take additional pupils.

Natalie, i am so pleased for you that you were successful. Sanity clearly reigns in some places and i hope your child is happy.

Thank you for posting that.

When i met with the head teacher she also didnt mention FAP. When we asked her and the admissions person at the school this week about FAP they both said they weren't quite sure how it works. The admissions person's reason for this was that they havent been doing the job long.

Do please say at the appeal that when you spoke to the person in admission they told you they weren't sure how FAP works. My jaw is hanging reading this.

Good luck for today

Thank you so much to everyone on here who has wished us well and the people who gave hours of their time at a weekend to help trawl through this. All we can do now is explain this to the panel and hope that they value our boy being in education as much as we do. Will update later xxx

Good luck today (been reading this thread with horror on your behalf!)