Reception application nightmare!

[Zwb39]

Hi all
Was hoping for some advice or if anyone is going through the same situation at the moment.
So my youngest is starting school in September and in December last year we applied online for his school which his older brother goes to and got the confirmation email. A week before applications closed we logged back into are account just to review the schools we had chose and as we was happy we logged back out. When the 16th of April came we logged in to find out what school are son had got only to find out apparently are application was unsubmitted when we reviewed the week before!!!! Now we have had to reapply as a late application and our son is only on the waiting list for schools. We checked the website and it only says if changes are made they won't be confirmed if u don't resubmit, but as we didn't make any changes we believed we didn't need to resubmit our application again.
Thanks for any advice

That’s odd.. our system was the same, you could log back in & look at your choices. Literally just look & log back out. If you made changes, then you did need to resubmit. I did it several times!

I can still log in & look at mine now .. can you do so? What does the status say? You say you have the original confirmation email - I think this is important. Does that confirm you definitely submitted your app in December? What do the council say you did in April that caused it to unsubmit itself?!

The question here is whether or not by going onto the website but not altering anything, this removed your original application. There is absolutely no doubt that you can normally go onto the admission site and make changes if it is before the cut-off date. If you went back on the site before January 15th then you should have been safe to check and then come out again. That begs a number of questions. Can you prove the original application, the answer to which appears to be yes you got confirmation email. Was it actually within the time period when you could go onto the site? If it was then you should be able to get the LA to confirm when you went back onto the site and also explain why your action effectively voided your original application. The LA will have to explain that at any appeal along with stating what messages there were on the website to say altering this will remove your application. I presume that you did not see any such signs whilst you were on the site.
Your post does suggest that you went onto the site a week before the April 16th date when allocations are made, rather than the week before the cut-off date which would be very early January. Which is it?
You are going to have to go to appeal for the schools you expressed as a preference and try and prove your case. Please be warned that I have sat on many panels where parents say the same thing, we applied properly and something has gone wrong in the software. In nearly every case the LA has been able to prove that they did something wrong and it was not the system. However there have been cases where there has been a glitch but you need to try and prove that is what happened here. It is imperative that you get the printouts from the LA, so that you can see all the actions that took place on your account.

Hi thanks for your replies. Yes sorry it was on the 5th of January we logged back in and this is what the LA told us is the date and reason for unsubmitting, if we log into the education portal there is nothing there. We had to go into a different site to make a late application. The other odd thing is on the original application we put 2 schools and on the late application we only put 1 school which is the 1 our older child goes to. But somehow we are on the waiting list of the 2 schools of the original application? Surely if it was unsubmitted he would not be on both as the second school is not in our catchment and there is other schools nearby.
Thanks

For you to have two preferences on the current system you either told the LA and they have set it up as that or there is something strange going on.
I would ask the LA now in writing to explain how there are two preferences on your form when you only put down one preference on the second application. Say that suggests that there must be an original application still in the system somewhere and see what kind of response you get.
It is important in this kind of situation that when you go to appeal that you can prove everything you say. So it is vital that you get everything in writing from the LA. If they prefer to deal on the phone, then you should email them immediately after the conversation saying this is my understanding of the telephone conversation that we have just had. If they have another interpretation then they will be back on the phone quick enough.

Thanks again, we will definitely be contacting the LA about this. Also in your experience being on an appeal panel is this the best route to go down or does simply having a sibling in said school give as a good chance of winning an appeal?
Thanks again

Sibling really isn't relevant, especially if this is ICS (infant class size - 30 per class in YrR, 1,2). Sibling link will probably put you very high on the waiting list though.

You will need to prove the LA made an error that cost you a place, so as Admission says, you need as much in writing as possible about what has happened, including any confirmation emails you have from the admissions system when you made your application.

Ok thank you.
1 other thing I forgot to say was after finding out the application was unsubmitted we spoke to the school our older son goes to and was told it was strange as my younger child was on there preliminary list? Is this a list schools get before applications close or something they would get after?
Thanks again

The preliminary list could be one of two things. It could have been a list that is a list of every person who has applied for a place at the school, which is generated after the cut-off date in January. If the school is the admission authority (a faith school or an academy mainly) then the school are required to put the list into the correct order according to the admission criteria order and then return it to the LA, who then do all the IT work for allocating places.
The other alternative is that the school will get a list about two weeks before the places are confirmed to parents on 16th April, which is the list of pupils allocated a place at the school.
Either way if the school got a list and your younger son was named on the list, that says they were expected to be allocated a place at the school. So how did the application suddenly disappear from the system?
Again you need to get back to the school and ask them for a copy of the list. It does not matter if the school have to redact every name on the list other than your child, what is important is that sometime after the cut-off date in January you were expected to get a place at the school and is therefore a vital piece of evidence that there has been some kind of system malfunction and you should have been offered a place.

Thank you for your help, I will get all the relevant information together to support my case

If the school is a faith school or an academy and had to rank their applications, it is likely they will have downloaded not only the list but also the individual full applications. We do this so we have the original applications because if there are address changes, etc later the application is just updated and the latest version sits there as the only available application to refer to.

Ok so I looked back over are admission booklet and this is what it says about
Changing preferences.
You can change your preferences on your
online application by logging into your account,
amending your existing application and
resubmitting it. You must ensure you resubmit your amended application by the closing date or your changes will not be taken into account when you application is processed.

And just looked at the education portal and this is what's on there.
You must SUBMIT your application when you have finished it. If you log back into your application to review or make changes you must RESUBMIT it, otherwise the changes will not be processed.

So 2 different sayings on 2 different pages plus this doesn't actually state in plain English that your previous submitted application will be unsubmitted

The admission booklet seems clear that you need to resubmit if you amend your application. There is no suggestion that you need to resubmit in other circumstances.

The website wording is poor. On the one hand it says you must resubmit if you review your application, on the other it says that "the changes will not be processed" if you do not do so. But, if you simply review your application, there are no changes to process.

From a usability point of view, I cannot see any justification for requiring parents to resubmit an application just because they have viewed it without making any changes. That is just lazy programming by the software developers.

On the basis of the information posted here, I think you have a good case. Agree with Admission about the information you need to get from the school and LA to support your appeal.

Hi thanks for your reply. I think the LA will go down the route that it's says review and need to resubmit, but like you stated it's very poor wording and there should be no need to resubmit just for viewing.
I have looked at what other LA policy on viewing an already submitted application and most seem to say only your changes need to be resubmitted and if they are not your already submitted application will be taken into account

Hi was wondering if the school is an academy is it there decision to go over th PAN or is it still the LA?

An academy is its own admission authority so they can decide whether to go over PAN. The LA has no say. However, if they would have classes of 30 in Reception, Y1 or Y2 if all three years were full, the only way they can go over PAN is if they decide to have a bulge class. They cannot just admit one or two extra other than in special circumstances (successful appeals, child with an EHCP and a handful of other situations).

If they do decide to go over PAN they would have to employ another teacher. Children put in via appeal would be considered excepted child so no extra teacher is required.

So yesterday we received information from the school that they got there preliminary list in December which had my child's name and then there final list in February without his name. And today was strange as we haven't heard anything from the LA even though we have spoke to them every other day, we received a hand delivered envelope addressed to someone else which contained a welcoming letter from a school we had never applied to( they also got my child's name slightly wrong)! How can we get this without even a school offer?

Hi,
I would ask the LA to provide you with the information of when the system updated to the named school was removed of off choice list. If you had of made edit/changes you would of received a notification.

Have you asked the primary school what position your son is on the list.

It is obviously a system error which you have a good argument for your appeal. Hopefully the school will off you a place before then.

Did you receive any school offers on offer day? I would ring the school first which you were offered and ask them was a application submitted or your behalf or was that a offer from the LA.

Unfortunately, your child being on the list in December but not in January doesn't prove that there was a system error. It does, however, confirm that your application was removed, presumably when you checked it.

The communication today is very odd. You should get an offer from the LA before you hear anything from a school.

Must be one of the worst LA around as whenever we talk to someone they always tell us different things. But I think where going to appeal on the basis of there being a system error or just a terrible design in unsubmitting just for logging in. I checked other LA websites an most state that if you make changes and don't submit then they will not be counted bit your original submitted application will be.

So at least you now know that your application disappeared sometime between December and February. You need to get the information from the LA on when exactly the application disappeared and see whether that correlates with the time that you went back onto the site. Getting that information before the appeal is important because knowing it was definitely when you went back onto the site will set what your appeal should be about. That there is a software issue that allowed you to somehow remove the application without you changing anything. I think the other point to make is that surely when somebody goes back onto the site and manages to remove the application that this should bring up some kind of red flag so that the LA can check that this is a deliberate decision and not as appears here some how deleting the application.
The other point of finding out the date of the removal is that if my some strange quirk it was removed on a different day, that asks all sorts of questions on how it came to be removed and by whom.