Primary school allocation countdown- Thursday 16th April...

[MTWTFSS]

Is anyone else dying to find out which school they have been allocated?

This is for my PFB which makes it extra difficult for me :(

I can't talk about it in real life as it starts off as a nice casual conversation ending with some delusions of grandeur PFB nonsense

Pagerty Surely if they get for example 18 children this year, can't they just have a class of 18 instead of 15?

If you did take 18 children this year-and you would need the approval of the local authority and governors, it can cause problems with class sizes through the rest of the school. 15 is a normal PAN in a small school as two year groups means a class of 30, anything over this in KS1 needs an additional teacher.

Certainly in our area we know who has applied for our school but that includes those who have placed us first, second and third choice. So those who placed us second or third may well go somewhere else! If we have fewer first choice places than our PAN allows, we can also be pretty sure who is coming but you never really know until allocation day!

Our classes do go on to be mixed from yr1 so they would never take more than 16. It is a very small village and usually the intake from in catchment v out of catchment is usually half and half but this year there is an unusually high in catchment set of children plus a unusually high number of out of catchment with siblings. More than places available. Luckily in our LEA in catchment come above out of catchment with siblings.

I am nervously waiting allocation day so I can only imagine how those families are feeling, especially as most of them have already worked out where each of them are in order of distance to the school. It's awful they make us wait so long.

Being such a small community we pretty much know most of the children from the village and this who have applied but obviously we are not privy to others who may have applied out of catchment within the SEN or LAC criteria.

I have never wanted the school holidays to pass so quickly before!

My local primary has a PAN of 15 and mixed aged classes in KS1 & 2 but last year 8 children won their appeals so they were forced much to the head's annoyance to have a reception class of 23. Obviously this will have a knock on effect in future.
So I'm afraid mixed age classes aren't protection against higher intake.

tiggy

siblings are 4th on the list and feature after catchment.

The appeal panel among other things criticised the fact that the school was running considerably under capacity. (School has capacity for 120 places but had only 75 pupils)
35 children applied for 15 places and 17 people appealed with 8 being successful.

Even with 8 pupils winning appeals the class is only 23

It's a new build replacing our tiny village school (old school had 2 classrooms - new has 5) so numbers further up the school reflect the size of the previous building.

It's quite a simple matter not to exceed the infant class size tiggy ... Mixed reception Y1 class plus mixed Y1/2 class. It's how the school was organised under the previous head.

The school is very popular because if outstanding results which the head believes would be compromised if they had larger class sizes. They were also criticised for having a distance criteria of 400 yards (in a rural farming area)

Head is definitely being precious and still making her feelings known

400 yards That is nothing!

Good morning ladies... 18 days to go... and we've lost an hour :(

400 yards in a rural area when the nearest house to the school is 350 yards away is very different to 400 yards in a town or city where the school is in a busy street or estate.
The other village schools in my area that have a distance criteria state 5.5 miles or more ...

How does a distance criteria of 400 yards (or whatever other distance) work?

The only distance criteria used by the schools we've applied to is closest walking distance. I can find information about how far away the last child admitted lived, but saying that the last child admitted lives, say, 400 yards away sounds like it should be different to a distance criteria of 400 yards.

I had a letter yesterday from my third choice school offering DS a place in the nursery class. I think it's just because we considered it and put an application in last year but then decided to keep him in the private nursery.

400 yards is the walking distance ... The point being that in a rural area very few homes are within that distance unlike in s twin or city where there may be dozens/hundreds of homes.

How far away is the next school?

So is it that the admissions limit is so tiny that the last place was taken by a child living 400 yards away on distance grounds?

Agree that 400 yards is next to no distance in a rural context btw.