School appeal - urgent

[monyk12]

Dear parents,

This is a desperate post re schools and appeals; apologies if not allowed, I can delete if needed.

I have appealed for reception for my daughter and I am looking to find information, reasons, motivations on how to build a successful school appeal.
I am concerned that the offered schools is unsuitable for my daughter and the hearing is tomorrow.
Any information welcomed.
Many thanks in advance.

I'd love to hear the 4 year old's take on Cabaret, The Crucible, The Tempest, Private Lives, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, to say nothing of operas and ballets shown in the last year.

I imagine the other 22 families on the reception waiting list are prepping their appeals accordingly now they know what the true criteria for admission are. 🤔

This thread has rapidly turned into one of my favourites. Hilarious. I’m particularly captivated by the idea that sibling link isn’t fair/relevant, but that the OP’s ease of commute is. Why do you think the sibling rule is there? (Clue: it’s so that parents don’t have to drop off at two different schools in opposite directions)

OP, if you won, it is solely because of the miscalculated distance, not because of any of the other ‘reasons’ that your PFB deserved that school place more than anyone else. They don’t.

It’s fair to say that most appeals threads don’t go quite like this.

If the appeal really was allowed on the basis cited by OP, I suspect that at this moment the school is working on judicial review proceedings to get the decision set aside as wholly unlawful.

I don't believe you, OP and am calling you out. I think it's disinformation and unhelpful to other parents to claim that you won an ICS appeal with the information posted at the beginning of the thread. How is it helpful to mislead others in this way?

It'll be a big class with the 22 people ahead of you in priority order in there?

That's not how appeals work, to be fair.

@Lougle it is if it's based on distance as the OP insinuated. If OP should have got in and 22 people live closer than her, the school is obliged to offer them all a space.

A local school had this exact issue (thankfully with 3 pupils, not 20) where a parent challenged the measurement and the appeal was upheld and places had to be offered to other children who had missed out because of the miscalculation.

@TheLemon As noted above I think by PanelChair, it's entirely possible that the error just affected one address - if the nodal point to her house was incorrect for some reason. It happens (rarely) but it does, and as such it's an error that just affects that application, not others.

Not saying that is necessarily what has happened here, but it does occasionally happen.

It’s also misleading to talk of the 22 children “ahead of” OP’s child.

First of all, if they’re all in the distance category on the waiting list, they’re ahead of OP’s child because they’re ranked in distance order and so, if OP’s distance was wrongly calculated, her place on the waiting list would change. Secondly, the waiting list and appeals are entirely separate. OP winning her appeal doesn’t mean that the children ahead of hers on the waiting list have to be admitted.

With the school I knew, the council had put the school's main entrance in the wrong place on the map and calculated from there, so it did affect multiple people. It was a matter of about 15 metres but caused a lot of issues.

Yes, something similar happened in another group of appeals I was involved in years ago, in the days when the LEA used “safe walking route” instead of straight line distance and had overlooked a footpath. The distance for all the children who might have used that footpath had to be recalculated.

However, we don’t know what the alleged error was here or whether it might have affected other children, so this is all conjecture.

I think it's safe to say that this thread is not the thread to base appeal hopes on.