Year 5 in school admission appeal help please!

[Cliclop]

Long story short.
We recently relocated and put in an in year school application for my daughter (year 5) back in September. The application was lost and I only found out once I went into the school we applied for and they told me no application had been received. I have since had a refusal letter and been allocated a school 3.2 miles away. The school we applied for is 0.4 miles away. I am going to appeal this decision. My question is the school PAN is 45, but the school have advised me that they have mixed year classes. This is what the school replied when I asked what their PAN was.
“I can however, tell you the number in Year 5 is 38, and their PAN is 45, however, they operate a mixed year group, so although it looks like they have space, in fact they don’t”
So am I right in thinking they are actually 7 under the PAN?
Would my daughter not be classed as “an exception” as she has moved from outside the area?
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have a bored 10 year old who has just moved from all her friends and desperate to start to school!

This is quite complicated. The published admission number of 45 is the number of pupils that have to be admitted by law into reception year. The school have told you that the PAN for year 5 is 45, so it has obviously not change for a number of years.

In theory the school has to admit to 45 in every other year group and that is what the advice would normally be, that the school have a legal requirement to accept your application because the year group is not at its PAN.

However when the school is using mixed age classes they can sometimes argue that the classes they have are not able to be increased in size and therefore not accept a pupil midyear. With a PAN of 45, nearly all such schools operate with 3 classes of 30 across years 3 and 4 and then another 3 classes of 30 across years 5 and 6. If the school is saying they cannot accommodate then they may be running with 2 classes across year 5 and 6 and it could be possible that they are running two classes with 30+ in each class. Another alternative is that whilst they could accommodate an extra pupil at this time, when they move into year 6, they cannot , which is callde future prejudice. The alternative is that they are running 3 classes across years 5 and 6 in which case they should be forced to take your child.
The first thing to do is find out by looking at their website and probably asking the school exactly how many classes they have and what there break down is. That will tell you whether they are running 2 or 3 classes in years 5 and 6 and what tack to take in your appeal.

From your post I would say that your child does not count as an excepted pupil because you have been offered a school place and at 3.2 miles this is perfectly reasonable distance (in an official sense, though I accept you will have a different point of view). I am guessing from your comments that you rejected the school place, which now leaves you with the problem of finding a school place. Given we are now in November I am surprised that you have not been contacted by the LA about non-attendance at school.

Another interesting aspect of your post is that the school / LA managed to loose the application in September. Do you have any written confirmation that you filled the form in and sent it. If you do that will strengthen your appeal because it is quite possible that if the application was at the start of the academic year the school could have accommodated an extra pupil in year 5.

Please feel free to contact me on PP if you feel i can help in any way or you want me to look up data for the number of school places available.

Thanks so much for your reply! Very helpful.
How do I message you please?

“I can however, tell you the number in Year 5 is 38, and their PAN is 45, however, they operate a mixed year group, so although it looks like they have space, in fact they don’t”

It sounds like they are saying they have over filled year 6 and taken some year 5 spaces to do so. It could well be that they have 52 year 6s, so their total combined year 5/6 is already 90, despite them being under PAN for year 5.