School admissions question

[ParentX]

The wife and I have a six-year old boy. We live in the catchment area of an over-subscribed junior school less than a kilometre away, where we'd like him to go next year. The admission criteria are fairly standard, featuring children in care, catchment area, distance to school, siblings, special needs, and so on. To apply for this school we send the usual application form to our LEA giving our 1st 2nd and 3rd choices.

There's nothing unusual about that. But what I thought was unusual is that there's a new academy school opening next year about 3km away, and we have to send a separate application form to the same address as the LEA application form. There's one "admissions team" dealing with all applications.

Suspicious as I am, it occurred to me that if we apply for the new academy school, the admissions team might fiddle things such that we get offered a place at the academy but don't get offered a place at our local school. Does anybody have any experience of this sort of thing? if so I'd be grateful if you could share it.

Thanks in advance.

That's quite normal. The new academy won't have had its funding agreed yet so it wouldn't be fair to ask parents to use one of their choices on something that may not go ahead, however small that chance is.

No fiddling goes on. There are very strict rules they follow

That's normal for new schools OP. In my area there was a potential new school that couldn't offer places for September 2014, due to delays in setting the new school up, so this can happen.
With Y3 places sometimes there are different admissions criteria to reception entry e.g. your child may have had to attend certain feeder infant school(s) so I would check this before applying.
HTH

Thanks everybody. Catslife, the feeder schools isn't an issue. Titchy, if the new academy school doesn't go ahead there will be trouble! The thing that has me puzzled is that it's the same admissions team. If the application for the new academy school went to it, I can imagine a complete separation. But this would result in chaos wherein ninety LEA junior school places have to be re-offered late in the day. Bearwithspecs: my fear is that our application to the academy will be treated as if it was a first choice, and that this won't be seen as fiddling, but instead will be seen as prudent organisation.

There are extremely strict rules to prevent this happening, and if it did happen I would be obvious, you would appeal and would win that appeal.

If you don't get a place in your first choice school, you'll get a letter saying your distance to the school is 957m and the last-admitted pupil in your category had a distance of 865m (or whatever). It's down to solid facts, so no capacity for fiddling such as you fear. That furthest-distance is published openly, so if you live closer to the school than that you get a place and your 2nd and 3rd choices are irrelevant.

The application to the academy will be treated completely separately. Assuming you qualify for the other schools, and the academy's funding agreement gets approved, you will get two offers, one for the academy (assuming you meet their criteria of course), and one for your highest place school on the normal form. At that point you will need to choose.

Thanks fish and titchy.

My understanding was that in the first year a new Academy or Free School ran their own admissions, so I suppose in this case they have asked the LEA to run them for them.

Is you child in school now given he's 6?