Primary School Offer revoked

[FlopFlaps]

Hello,

I'm posting because someone suggested Mumsnet was a good place to go for advice on this matter.

On Primary offer day my son was offered our 5th choice school on offer day which we accepted immediately (we are in the Lewisham borough). We received a call today to say that we (along with 9 other families) have had our place at that school revoked because the council 'IT department' miscalculated the distances from this particular school. They say they are doing an internal investigation as to how this happened.

We now have been offered a school that wasn't one of our choices.

Just wondering if anyone is or has been in a similar situation and has any advice?

As I understand it, appeals are usually unsuccessful, but are they possible for a case like this?

Had we been offered this school on offer day I think we would have been fairly chilled about it - it is what it is. But it's more annoying that's it's taken a fortnight to tell us, and we've already registered wraparound care for the school we thought we had. So I am just a bit in shock at the moment, to be honest.

The admissions code makes it clear that admissions authorities can revoke an offer only under very limited grounds, one of which is that it was offered in error, which appears to be the case here.

At this point, you could go back to them and try and argue that 2 weeks is too long a time to have left this - there have been legal cases that suggests around 3 days is the maximum reasonable, but this hasn't been tested recently to my knowledge under the current admissions code so I suspect that may not get you anywhere.

There is also an argument that the error has further disadvantaged you in that you should have been considered for your 6th choice school and if you would prefer that school, you could push them to check whether, had they measured correctly, you would have a place there (or actually at any of your other choices; I would check the furthest distance admitted for all, as its possible if they used the wrong distance for one school they used it for all).

Realistically though, I suspect they may push this to appeal. Would it be an ICS appeal do you know? (what is the PAN?)

Lewisham council are just rubbish at this kind of thing. I would escalate to the Cabinet member for education - you won't get anywhere with the staff.
What's the school out of interest

This is one of those areas where there is lots of argument about what should happen. As PatriciaHolme says there is some old legal cases which suggest that if the withdrawal of place is greater than 3 days after the place was offered then it should not be withdrawn.That is because the parties involved have "got used to" the belief that they have a place.
There is another group who believe that the school admission guidance as it is now written does allow the places to be withdrawn as long as it was offered in error.
Another group would argue that as soon as an offer is made in writing then it should not be withdrawn. In other words, as in this case, the nine pupils whose offers were incorrect are allowed to keep the school places but the 9 pupils who, if it had been done correctly, would have been offered the places have now not be treated fairly, that is maladminstration and should be offered places at the school. That of course leads to all sorts of issues. If this is a primary school with 30 places, adding another 9 into the one class is not realistic. If it is 9 places in a school with an admission number of 90 then you are looking at 3 extra in 3 classes which is still a lot but maybe just about manageable.
You absolutely need to go to appeal over this and let a panel decide whether 14 days is too long.
For me there is also another issue and that is what exactly happened. It is unacceptable that the LA is simply saying this mistake was made. The IT system for measuring the straight line distance is very accurate, so you do not "miscalculate" you only get it wrong if you are measuring to the wrong home from the central seed point on the school or something similar. I would question why there are only 9 pupils who have a wrong measurement and would want the LA to disclose exactly what procedures they have adopted in this situation to redo all the applications for this school to check that they are accurate.

Thank you @PatriciaHolm - I'm not sure of the difference between ICS and PAN. I'm all new to this. Could you give me some advice?

@cocktailoclock the school that was our 5th choice and the one we got on offer day was Trinity primary. The new school we have been offered was St Matthew Academy.

@admission I'm so grateful for your detailed response, and have copied and pasted some bits in my response to the LA. I have found out today from Trinity (not the LA) the exact cause of the error. Trinity is an all through school with two separate sites for the primary and secondary phase the LA accidentally measured the distances from the secondary site which is just around the corner from us. The primary site is just under a mile away. I don't know if this strengthens or weakens our case? I would also assume far more than 9 families are impacted based on this.

But I understand this isn't the first time this has happened in Lewisham www.standard.co.uk/news/education/school-place-offers-withdrawn-after-catchment-area-blunder-8597134.html

I would escalate - I moved my children from Southwark to Lewisham and it was so hard and so difficult because of the incompetent lewisham education department

I have checked the admission criteria for the school and there is no question that the LA were required by the admission policy for the primary part of the school to measure the straight line distance from the central node point at the primary site to your home. As such the LA have messed up big time.
Having said that this is VA school and therefore their own admission authority. Having looked at the school website it suggests that the governing board has an admissions committee. Part of their duties include, as per the admissions guidance paragraph 2.7, putting all the applicants for places at the school in admission criteria order. The admission criteria for the school includes various levels of faith applications all of which lead to a straight line distance criteria. As such one could argue that this panel should have recognised that the distances to the primary school site were not correct. So both the school and the LA are at fault for this.
The school only has 60 places in the school at primary level so taking an extra 9 pupils I think any panel would struggle with having classes of 34 and 35 in. The panel cannot direct the school to open a new classroom for extra pupils.
Clearly you need to establish whether the issue is confined to 9 pupils or whether it is more wide spread, only the appeal can establish. There is however seems to be no question that if the admission process had been completed correctly you would not have been offered a place at the school. As such the appeal is all about having been told you have a place at the school for 2 weeks before being told there has been a mistake made is it too long a period of time. Secondly then if the panel do agree it was too long are the panel going to accept that the school can run effectively with 34 and 35 in classes.
In the circumstances I might be tempted to try and get the school to accept there is an issue that needs resolving and it is their Christian Duty to do something about it now, rather than let it drag on into appeals.

If they hadn’t made a mistake Would you have got your sixth choice? How do you find that out? If it turns out you should have been given your 6th choice will you have to appeal for that too?

With a PAN of 60, it's likely any appeal would be ICS - infant class size - as there will be 30 children per teacher in classes in reception (or Y1 or Yr 2) and that is the legal maximum.

ICS appeals can only be won on very limited grounds, which are the admissions criteria were illegal/the criteria being incorrectly applied which cost you a place/the decision not to award a place is so perverse as to be unreasonable. You would need to make a case that removing the place is legally unreasonable, which is pretty high bar.

As admission says, I think trying to convince a panel to admit another 9 pupils because the LA made a mistake is unlikely. Though of course we don't know whether all nine would take it to appeal.

It's a bit of a mess, unfortunately. I would agree with admission that the first thing to do is to try to persuade the school to deal with it, rather than have to deal with an appeal (or multiple appeals). However, I suspect they may be tempted to blame the LA for the measurement error.

Agree with Admission and PatriciaHolm. This is a mess. This kind of mistake really shouldn't happen.

With a PAN of 60 I would be very surprised if this isn't an infant class size case, which means you can only win an appeal if you can show that a mistake has been made that has cost your child a place. The initial mistake of measuring the distance incorrectly doesn't help you as that resulted in you being offered a place that should never have been offered. The question is whether the appeal panel accept the applicability of previous legal cases which established that an admission authority must withdraw any places offered in error within 3 days. The admission authority will undoubtedly argue that changes to the Admissions Code mean this no longer applies. I personally think it does but, until someone take a case to judicial review, we won't know for sure.

Even if the appeal panel agree that the places should not have been withdrawn, you then have the problem of the number of children involved. If they all go to appeal the panel will almost certainly decide that the school can't accommodate all of them, which means they will have to compare cases to decide who to admit. Therefore, as well as convincing the panel that the place should not have been withdrawn, you need to make the strongest possible case as to why your son will be disadvantaged if he doesn't go to this school.

Ideally the school should sort this out before appeal, but it wouldn't surprise me if they say that this is the LA's fault and there is nothing they can do.

I’m no expert but as part of your appeal I would also seek to establish when events took place. The panel may be more sympathetic to the error and/or discovery of it if all those involved were working at home off ancient iPads whilst caring for their own children at the time due to the pandemic.

Personally I wouldn't bother with that kind of timeline. The OP doesn't want the appeal panel to make allowances for the LA because they were working from home or whatever. The important dates are 16th April, which is when offers went out, and 30th April, which is when they were withdrawn. The OP wants the appeal panel to accept that this was too late to withdraw the offer regardless of the situation.

There's another side to this, of course, which is the families living nearer the primary than the secondary, who were originally told they hadn't got a place. Presumably it may have been their appeals that drew attention to the error, and their appeals would have to go through as there had undoubtedly been an error.

69 kids is too many unless they add another class - and even if they are able to do that, do they then open up another 20 spaces at that school, and have to rejig all the admissions? It probably is rather simpler and fairer (in the long run) to withdraw the erroneous offers. If you've lost money on a deposit on wraparound care, ask about compensation.

I do not believe that it was appeals that started off this issue, because to date there have been very few secondary ones and I suspect no primary ones. My suspicion is that a parent went to the school or LA and said this can't be right on distance, followed by lots of backpedalling by the LA.
I have seen similar examples to this in the past where the LA admitted to the error and paid up for an extra teacher and TA for the school and ran with 3 smaller classes. As it was in an area where there was considerable mobility, by year 2 the school was back down to 60 pupils and 2 classes.
Now where there is less available funding, the LA's tend to do what this one has done, which is remove the place, which brings right back to what is fair or not fair to both sides in this issue.

their appeals would have to go through as there had undoubtedly been an error

No, they wouldn't. If the LA had said they couldn't withdraw the offers as it had been too long and there had been appeals for all 9 affected children, the appeal panel should have concluded that the school couldn't handle that many additional pupils. Under the Admission Appeals Code they must then decide how many the school can handle and compare cases to decide which appeals should succeed.

The OP doesn't want the appeal panel to make allowances for the LA because they were working from home or whatever.

Indeed. The reason for my suggesting a timeline is so that if the school/LA make some reference to the ‘unprecedented circumstances’ their staff were working under this admissions cycle, the OP will know if this was legitimate or not and can challenge accordingly.

Lewisham LEA are shite: learned this during DD's secondary waiting list fiasco. All the teachers are aware. No advice I'm afraid, hope other posters have given you some useful pointers. Good luck !