Primary school appeals

[Sjh35]

I’m hoping someone can help me or give me some advice!
I’ve been offered my 4th place on my daughters primary school application.
I only put it as it said to put 4, I didn’t take into account distance/traffic etc and never thought she would get the 4th choice as our catchment school was my 2nd choice.

I have appeals for my 1st and 2nd choice but I’ve never done this before so if anyone could give me some advice it would be greatly appreciated!! 🙏

How big is the intake?

In very dense areas it can happen (any blocks of flats in the area for example?) Or there's lots of siblings... Sometimes a whole class can fill with siblings.

But presumably other non siblings allocated a place were less than 800m away. In some areas, with flats or new builds, the distance criteria can be tight. Your admissions information pack should give the info for 2020 admissions as a starting point. What was furthest pupil admitted then? Ask for same for this year.

OP as others said the fact you were within catchment in previous years is irrelevant. Or that it is the closest school.

The process is simple (I am a governor and part of the process so I know). We sit together and we look at all the criteria one by one. Once we get to distance we offer places to the closest and the next closest until we run out of spaces.

Many of the children will prefer places at other schools so we will then move to the next closest child.

In my DDs case we lived 278 meters from the school. We didn't get a place due to distance. The catchment was 253 meters. I expect yours is the same.

Appeal won't get you anything. But you can go on the waiting list and there will be a good chance that a child may move, chose another school and your child can get the place.

Thanks for the correction LIZS I hadn't realised that.

My partner appealed for the school out son went to nursery at as we had to cross a motorway to get to the one we were offered. Then I ended up having to do the meeting - I felt quite silly, they were very kind and sympathetic but said the class was full so they would have to build another classroom and hire another teacher to take my son :)

Hearing you being told that the class was full, so they would have to build another classroom and hire another teacher is quite worrying. They would not need to do this but are making an assumption that no class can be more then 30 pupils. That is not correct, the infant class regulations clearly say that there is a maximum of 30 with one school teacher not a maximum class of 30. It would be perfectly legal to have a class of 31 or more as long as there were two qualified school teachers in the classroom. Economically it makes no sense but it is perfectly legal.

A couple of years ago at my son's school something like 72 out of the 90 places went to siblings, so a lot of children who would have got in on distance in previous years missed out. Sounds like maybe something like that happened this year for you OP. It's a real shame, but unless there has been a demonstrable mistake in your place allocation you don't really have grounds to appeal. I hope you get a place via the waiting list.