School Admission to Reception- Distance from school

[NikosCharalambous]

Dear All, thank you for accepting me at Mumsnet. We had a dissappointing experience recently. We have twin daughters and we live in the London Borough of Barking and Daghenham. We enrolled them at the nursery of our nearer school Eastbury Community Primary. We walk 5 minutes to the school so it made sense.

We were slightly shocked to find out that the girls were not accepted to reception of primary of this school (our first choice) because we are located 480 m away from the school and the last child was taken at a distance of 467m away from the school. We were told the girls were in the interest list positions 8 and 9.

We lodged and appeal and during our preparation for the appeal we found out that the point the school admissions team took the measurement from was the 'official entrance' of the school but in fact it is an entrance not used by the primary school.

The distance of our school to the entrance of the Primary school is 300 metres! So the school admissions team took the measurement from the entrance to the secondary school two blocks away from our house.

Eastbury Community School is a big school complex with three entrances. My common sense suggests that if the school admissions team applies distance as a criterion then the point they take the distances from should be relevant to the everyday lives of the pupils.

The appeal was not allowed because the appeal panel found that the schools admission team has correctly applied their 'formula'. The schools admission team told us that taking distances from this point has 'never been challenged'. The problem with this answer is that the point the distances are taken from is not public information (only when I asked them to confirm where they took the distances from, they admitted it) and even few parents would have the technical ability to obtain OS maps and take the measurements in a Computer Aided Design software (I happen to be an Architect).

I suppose I would like to know if there is any legal guidance on this, and who makes the decision for the point the distances are measured from. I asked the governors of the school and they told me that it is probably the Local Authority. Is it proper that the school does not have a say in this and it is decided by -effectively- bureaucrats?

I have written to the councillors and I have also prepared a presentation document (submitted in the appeal) explaining the issue, but I have not received any response yet.

Many thanks in advance.

I'm not an expert but I'd say you have a point. Although your children being accepted on appeal basis probably means the other people on the waiting list may also be in a similar situation to you and they can't take all of them 😔

Thank you Russell for the prompt response. The appeal was not allowed so this is no longer an option. We accepted an offer to a school almost four times the distance of our neighbourhood school. Moving the point to take the distances from would definitely upset the admission formula with our neighbourhood benefiting and other neighbourhoods not so much. My argument is that if you apply distance as a criterion for admission the two points (one's house and the point of the school) should reflect reality.

I realized that although I cannot upload pdfs i can upload an image of the document I prepared. I hope it makes sense. I think the only personal data shown are my own so I do not mind!

I suppose I would like to know who in the Local Educational Authority is making these decisions (a Councillor? someone else?) so that I raise this issue with them and if possible change it. Because it does not sound it is fair.

I think it’s standard for there to be a single point in the school that distance is measured from. I’m sorry.

I hope one of the admissions experts will be along shortly to advise. As a layperson who has also gone through this process recently, I think it’s very typical for schools to set out their distance criteria with reference to a fixed point on the school site. I’m sorry. Has there been any movement on the waiting list since April?

If they have taken the stand that a single point is THE point then nothing can be done as the admissions criteria has been fulfilled. However you can challenge it for future years - it may benefit you yet.

Other local authorities use multiple school gates and the computer system automatically calculates the home to school distance of all available for each school preference and chooses the smallest distance as THE one. I used to do exactly this job for my county - it was a massive project to map the easting and northing for every gate and check the age of the child allowed through it.

You can go on the waiting list for your preferred school though, and your children do not have to attend school until the term they turn 5 legally so you can accept their current offer and defer the place until they're 5 (latest is an Easter start for all) if you wish to see what's happening with the waiting list.

Unfortunately, this sounds correct and has been my experience. I called around a few local schools prior to our oldest starting school querying the furthest distance for admissions in the previous years & they explained that it was to a fixed point in the school which would have made us beyond the distance of the furthest child admitted for the last few years. We therefore opted to relocate ahead of school applications (the school closest to our old house had many issues & we were on the fence about moving but this swung it). I was told the same fixed point is used for everyone and can't be changed.

By entrance of the primary school do you mean
the Main Entrance door to the primary school
the main gate into the primary school ( used only by primary school pupils)

surely in any case it should state on the admissions criteria how the distance is measured ( as the crow flies / Google maps/ ordinance survey maps etc / computer program for measurement if used and from what point the distance is measured . if it states this it doesn’t matter what point is used but that it is used consistently and applied equally to every candidate.

They can use any point in the school site they like ( main entrance is common). Also distance is as the crow flies. When DS started school I didn't apply to the one that was technically closest as it was over a mile by road and there were several closer.

Thank you all for your comments.

The admissions guidance mentioned only 'as the crow flies' which we did not have a problem with. The admissions guidance did not mention which point is taken the distance from. I understand the fixed point although if a school has many entrances and especially when the entrance to the primary is clearly defined as separate from the entrance to the secondary, it feels 'blind' to apply a single point for the admissions both to the primary and the secondary. It may be lawful or 'in accordance with the guidance' but it feels so not correct.

I accept it can be distorting and even unfair to set a convenient entrance as the point to take measurements from. The only other fair option would be to set the centre of the school site. (We would get in, in this case too!)

Can I ask if you happen to know on who is responsible for this? I mentioned above it is not the school, so it should be someone from the Council. I am trying to find them to raise the issue. It would not be unfair for big all- through schools to have two points to take the distances from. One for the primary and one for the secondary.

Many thanks,
PS : I re-upload the image for the information of anyone who may wish to comment below

www.gov.uk/schools-admissions/admissions-criteria

this is Croydon as an example www.croydon.gov.uk/schools-and-education/schools/school-admissions/distance-between-your-home-and-schools

the image isn’t really relevant.

It’s up to you to do your due diligence about what the admissions criteria are. And what entrance they use.

Sorry - sloppy wording on my point.

what point the school use to assess distance from.

Hi,

I process admissions and write the admissions policies for the schools in our Trust.

You have to identify a single point to measure to for each school. It's not normally an issue and usually the main reception for each school. However, we have a school which is on two sites (KS1 and KS2), half a mile apart and we had to identify one reception as the point to measure to. In our case, the KS2 building was the original building, before expansion and was also housed the main administrative office, which meant we kept it as the point to measure to. This means our new starters for Reception in September have their distance measured to tge building they won't be in for 3 years, but it kept it consistent and didn't disadvantage any family who had children already in the school.

Importantly, the admissions authority can only have one point to measure to. The school were correct in what they did, provided it is a single school, albeit spread over multiple buildings and /or sites.

Importantly, the admissions authority can only have one point to measure to

That's not actually the case. It's entirely possible to have more than one nodal point, though it must be made clear in the admission criteria.

For example, a number of schools near me have more than one gate, and admissions criteria says they use the distance to the nearest official school gate available for pupils of the relevant year to use.

In this case, a policy like that would make more sense. If the LA is the admissions authority, then such decisions will be made by them, though they would normally consult the school in the process.

Despite being called Eastbury Community School, the school is, in fact, an academy according to the DfE. That means it is its own admission authority and can set its own oversubscription criteria, including determining how distances are measured. However, it appears that it currently allows the council to do this on its behalf, as a result of which it uses the same oversubscription criteria as local community schools.

The published criteria state that "all distances are measured from the centre of the child's home to the school's main gate". They do not specify which gate is the main gate. In my view the appeal panel has got this one wrong. As we are dealing with the primary school, I believe any reasonable person (and certainly any parent) would take the reference to the school's main gate as being a reference to the primary school's main gate. The counter argument is that it is a single, all through school with the entire school on a single site and the main gate is the entrance to the secondary school. However, the school clearly has a separate entrance (and, indeed, separate buildings) for primary pupils. Measuring from the secondary school entrance does not, in my view, make sense.

Unfortunately, your options from here are limited. You could refer the case to the ESFA. However, my experience is that they are extremely reluctant to intervene and will only do so when the Appeals Code has been breached in a way that disadvantaged the appellants. In this case I don't see any breach of the Appeals Code, just a decision by the panel that I consider to be unreasonable. Whilst you can try the ESFA (and certainly should try them first if you want to pursue this), I suspect the only way you will get anywhere with this is to refer the matter to judicial review.

Thank you so much! I thought I was somehow unreasonable pointing this out. I don't think the ombusdman would overturn the decision of the appeal panel as they would see more the legal aspect of the procedure and not the facts of the case. I have no reason to believe that the appeals panel did not conduct themselves properly and there was a legal advisor at the hearing. The only point I pointed to the appeals panel is that in our legal systems appeals can be used to clarify grey areas and this was a 'classic' of a grey area.

Applying the wrong premise (points to take a distance) correctly (measuring the distance) should be a matter of the appeal to clarify. But they did not. The only course of action I am pursuing now is to make Councillors aware of this so there is a clarification and a change at least for other parents who may find themselves in the same situation.

There are entire neighbourhoods that lose out and I understand that other neighbourhoods will lose out from the change but my argument (as you mentioned) is that fixing a point should not be detached from the life of the school and the life of the pupils.

Many thanks to all for the information and advice.