Primary Appeal

[Sitkit]

It’s been a long battle with a voluntary aided school and is like to appeal their decision not to give a place.

Can anyone tell me is there any way to obtain data on the schools year intake? Who they offer a place to and how many have enrolled? In order to prepare my case where would I obtain this information?

Your local council website should have admissions data. But I doubt it will show how many have taken up the places offered. If you're on a waiting list you can find out what place number you are. The school might be able to give some indication if the waiting list is likely to move much.

If they decline your application the letter should tell you which priority criteria were admitted and which your dc was placed in. If it is VA was additional information requested (ie. faith attendance) and supplied on time? Were you able provide it? Assuming this is Reception admissions data should be available after mid April on request. Historical data should already be online.

They, as their own admissions authority, should provide you promptly with information relevant to you appeal. PAN is part of this, as are numbers admitted (up to greatest distance offered in criterion where tie breaker was used)

Can you confirm which year group this is for? If Infant Class Size (ICS) rules apply, then how does PAN feature in your proposed appeal?

Also, I was wondering why a 'long battle'? I'm guessing this must be an in-year admission ?

As meditrina says, the school must answer any reasonable question you ask to help you prepare for your appeal. They cannot, however, give you any personal data. That includes information that allows you to identify who it is about indirectly, as well as information that names someone.

They will certainly include in their case information about the number of children in the year to which you are applying (which must be at PAN or above since they are refusing to admit your child) and the numbers in other years (at least, a total for the whole school if not a breakdown by year).

They should be able to tell you what categories of children were admitted during the normal admissions round and the distance from school for the last child admitted (assuming distance is the tie breaker), but I doubt they will want to give you more detail than that.

If this is, as meditrina speculates, an in-year admission, the categories of children admitted and the distance for the last place offered are unlikely to be relevant. If you think a child was admitted from the waiting list when your child should have been at the head of the list, that would certainly be relevant. But how places were allocated initially won't have affected your application. The only question for an in-year application is whether there was a place available and you were the highest priority applicant according to the school's published admission criteria.

If this is not an in-year case, I am intrigued as to why it is happening now (too early for the 2021 admissions round, late for the 2020 admissions round) and why there was a long battle.

If you would like to tell us more about your case you will get some good advice on here.

After we submitted our Appeal, we got a huge pack of the schools case which we could then use in the Appeal hearing... Classroom sizes, class sizes, data showing movement on class sizes etc.

thank you for your advise it’s really helpful!

prh47bridge, initially last April my child was didn’t get his choice in a VA school and was subsequently on a waiting list, I was going to appeal then but the school indirectly told me there was no need as my child was a high priority and would get a place as he was in the top waiting list.

Since then I have come to know that 2 places have come available since January and they have given it to someone else who have already started

I have contacted them and they have confirmed this and also have offered me the chance to appeal.

It just seems that we have been really unfortunate to miss out again , either that or there’s a personal issue..

I know it’s very hard to win an infant class appeal but I just want to see the data and the number of children admitted etc so I can understand why my child seems to be so unlucky.

Any help is appreciated.

Presumably those children admitted ahead of yours met the admissions criteria more closely, ie. having an ehcp naming the school, sibling link or live closer. Waiting lists are not first come, first served so you can move down as well as up. However you can appeal but for an infant class it will be hard to win.

Sounds like they were just simply higher priority.

The school is not actually required to operate a waiting list beyond Christmas so there are three possibilities here:

• there is no waiting list and places go to the first person who applies

• there is a waiting list and the children admitted were higher priority in the admission criteria than your child

• there is a waiting list and your child was higher priority than the children who were admitted

You only have a case for appeal in the third of those cases. You therefore need to find out if they are still operating a waiting list and, if so, why these other children were admitted ahead of your child.