Year 3 transfer from shit school to decent school

[Dexter77]

I have a massive problem regarding my 8 y/o’s school: she’s been attending an utterly terrible south London state primary for the past 4 years.
The school is dreadful and now rated “requires improvement”, and she needs to get out of there immediately, the damage that’s been done is already enormous both behaviourally and academically.

We have also just moved to another area, so she need to change schools anyway.
I have applied for in-year transfers to decent state schools in reasonable distance for months to no avail, they are all oversubscribed (in Islington and Camden, EC1 and surroundings). We are on a few waiting lists.

It is now late May and I’m panicking. We need a school place by September at the latest, and it needs to be a good school that can iron out some of the damage that’s been inflicted over the past few years and plug the massive gaps in her learning because of school closures during the pandemic.
I have even looked into private schools in our area, such as City School for Girls and their new Junior School, but we are too late for the admissions process for next September I think.
Where can I go from here? Are there any decent private schools in the Clerkenwell/Islington area or even Southwark that are worth the money and with a chance to be accepted for next September in either year 3 or 4? Or any undersubscribed good state schools? (Hahaha).

Losing my mind, it shouldn’t be this hard to obtain a school place that isn’t terrible, any advice greatly appreciated.

This board is quiet so maybe post in Chat for a good chance of responses?

Oh thanks @Strawblue , will do!

@Strawblue
Not sure where in Southwark you are looking but there are lots of good schools with places as families have left London. If you are near Dulwich, you could try Dulwich Hamlet or Heber. A private school like Rosemead would also likely have places.

I have even looked into private schools in our area, such as City School for Girls and their new Junior School, but we are too late for the admissions process for next September I think.

When you say 'I think', have you called them? Private schools have a lot of flexibility and unless your DD's year group is fully subscribed for Sept then it's entirely possible that you could get her in. Whoever is in charge of admissions, give them a call if you haven't already done so.

As PP said phone admissions! Most private schools are very accommodating!

Virtually all London primary schools are oversubscribed, some more than others. Your chance of getting a place in a Southwark school if you live in Camden or Islington is tiny.

If you applied for local schools and were refused, you could appeal. The school and LEA might grumble that their deadline for appealing has passed and they’re hearing appeals now, but that doesn’t take away your right to make a late appeal. If you want to appeal, act quickly, because any school that’s had to accept additional pupils on appeal will by definition be even more oversubscribed.

What helps you here is that Y3 appeals aren’t governed by infant class size appeals, so you can argue on “prejudice” grounds about your child’s need for a place at that school.

@ConfusedaboutSchool thanks, these sounds great but are way too far from us sadly. When I said Southwark I meant the zone 1 bit of it so we could just cross the river, we’re in EC1.
I thought the same re good schools having places, but it doesn’t seem to be true where I’ve been looking, all of Islington currently seems to only have availability in state schools that are chronically undersubscribed, and the private schools near us are either selective and full or way too expensive for what they offer, unless I’m missing something…

@PanelChair Oh that’s curious that you say that class sizes don’t apply to Y3 applications - we’ve been told everywhere we’ve applied so far that all Y3 places are taken. On what grounds could I appeal?

@zafferana have enquired re admission and was told today were too late, and there’s no flexibility in this case.

The difference is that ICS rules (derived from the legal limit on class sizes) apply for Reception and years 1 and 2. The only grounds on which you can win an appeal are establishing that there’s been an error which has cost your child a place or that the decision to refuse a place was so unreasonable (in the legal sense) that no reasonable person would have made it.

None of that applies from Y3 onwards. Appeals are determined on the balance of prejudice; the panel has to decide whether the prejudice (ie detriment) to the child in not getting a place outweighs the prejudice to the school in having to accommodate an additional pupil.

So, you have been told that local schools are full, but (assuming you made a formal application and were refused, rather than just ringing up to enquire) you can appeal that refusal. Obvious things to mention here are the detriment to your child in not having a school to go to and needing to be in a local school to settle and make friends in the new area.

I know someone who transferred their DD from a disappointing state primary to Newton Prep which is just by Battersea Park immediately south of Chelsea Bridge. They have been very happy with it and I think it was a mid year transfer arount y3/y4 (a few years ago now) after a similar crisis where the existing school could no longer be tolerated.- could be worthwhile to give the admissions office a call.

It isn't entirely true that most London schools are oversubscribed - the area of Hackney I teach in has several schools with falling numbers due to a combination of gentrification (knocking down cheap housing and building fancy flats for childfree people/parents of babies) and Covid flight. This is not a reflection on the quality of the schools, but does have an unfortunate knock-on effect that once classes start emptying out, it gives the impression that it isn't a desirable school. Depends what you mean by a good school though - these are schools with high levels of poverty, EAL, SEND etc but very dedicated staff and caring ethos.

I was a governor of a 60 PAN junior school and we never had any child let in on appeal. Just because they technically don’t have to stick to 30, doesn’t mean they won’t if they have done for years. If other schools have places you don’t get the popular one just because you fancy it. Appeal panels here always upheld the school position. 60 and no more. Other alternatives not too far away!

Have too contacted the schools you are on waiting lists for directly? The council takes ages to sort out places, schools themselves will often give you a heads up if a place might come up.

if you have moved to a different borough then the Fair Access Protocol says you must be given a school place. Have your new council done this?

you can also appeal against the refusal of an in year place. And infant class sizes don’t apply inyear 3 so you might have more chance of success

there is usually movement towards the end of the year anyway but places that come up at the end of the school year are often not allocated until September so you might just have to hold on

Well, the number of appeals in this corner of London this year shows that many of our schools remain oversubscribed and parents are still submitting appeals in the hope of getting a place. COVID flight here hasn’t been enough to leave schools with vacant spaces.

I’m surprised to hear of a junior school where the appeal panel has never come across an instance where the child’s need for a place outweighs the school’s need to stick to PAN (which is the essence of a non-ICS appeal). From memory (and of course it’s a broad average) something like 20% of non-ICS appeals succeed every year, so a success rate of 0% isn’t impossible but it is an outlier.

Have you asked you local council where there are spaces and researched the specific schools? Ofsted doesn't tell the full story.

@bluechameleon well, we’ve had 4 years in a state school with high levels of deprivation and SEN and it has been nightmarish, so yes, I am precisely trying to find a school with low levels of such children.
It just didn’t work for us at all, and as we all know, a school’s success depends to a large degree on the pupil population and only partially on the teaching quality. You can have the most caring, brilliant teachers you want, but if half the class is majorly deprived and has multiple behavioural and/or learning issues, results will suffer.
Our experience has made it abundantly clear that being exposed to excessive levels of deprivation in an English classroom with current levels of funding is no longer an option for us.

@Aroundtheworldin80moves Yes I have. The schools with availability are either many miles away, faith schools or terrible.

@Dexter77 that's not really true. High quality teaching, strong leadership and parents (poor or otherwise) that are supportive of their children's education is key.

Deprived primary schools in London like Mayflower outperform the top academically selective private schools in the country. See Sunday Times review below:

"Mayflower in Poplar, east London, boasts standard assessment tests (Sats) results that no independent prep school can beat and joins two other recent Primary Schools of the Year from London’s East End.

The majority of Mayflower’s 386 pupils come from ethnic minority communities. More than three-quarters are from Bangladeshi backgrounds and for 98% of pupils, English is an additional language. Sixteen languages including Russian, Somali and Arabic are spoken and, in a borough where 57% of children are living in poverty, more than half of the school’s pupils live in overcrowded homes and 42% qualify for pupil premium funding for disadvantaged children. The latter figure would be higher if the borough of Tower Hamlets didn’t provide free school meals for all its primary schools"

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/best-primary-school-of-the-year-mayflower-primary-poplar-london-k5x2w93dg

@Dexter77 I do think that word is spreading that there is space in good schools. One thing that seems to have happened this year is that student is lesser performing schools are transferring into the good schools which might explain what you are seeing.

Best of luck

Ok. I understand your position, but if you turn up at an appeal hearing and tell the panel that you don’t want your child to attend a school with deprived children, it might well backfire on you. For all you know, panel members might have children in the schools you disdain.

An appeal on the basis of the niceness (for want of a better word) of your preferred school is likely to fail. You would need to show that the preferred school would meet your child’s needs in a way that whatever school you’d been offered couldn’t, and the need would have to be something substantial, not just your preference as a parent for your child not to mix with those from deprived backgrounds.

I moved my Y4 DD from state to private. I contacted them at the end of July, had a visit, offered and accepted and she started in Sept. If you are thinking of the private route, it may not be too late providing they are not full

@PanelChair
London is perhaps different to a Shire county where just a few miles down the road in a town there were places. Of course we took DC where the school was named and for other reasons, such as looked after DC, but we won appeals. Didn’t have many because we weren’t over subscribed all the time and other schools were all good. We had a few appeals where people moved into the village but other schools did have places, so the appeal panels thought DC should have those places. I cannot recall any appeal going against us. However no shit schools!

@PanelChair Of course, I am not intending to appeal on the grounds of merely “fancying” a nicer school, the situation is that my child has some health issues and is temperamentally and physically not cut out to stand up to disruptive kids in a classroom the teacher doesn’t have under control. She has been assaulted and bullied on multiple occasions, the school was ok at reception as all kids were tiny and cute, but over time a number of children from problematic backgrounds have begun acting out regularly, being aggressive, picking on children like my kid and demanding the teacher’s attention at all times.
My child now fears school, has become withdrawn and on occasion emulates the bad language and behaviour of these kids, has fallen behind academically and has trouble sleeping.

She has been medically assessed for these reasons and recommendations to intervene and switch to a different kind of school have been made.

@GlitterSparkley really, at the end of July! How interesting, I assumed nobody would be in the office over the summer holidays. Thank you will try that!