Divorce and school application

[Trek28]

I am going through a difficult divorce and need to make an application for our daughter’s school place, as she is due to start school in September 2024. The application needs to be made by the 16th January 2024. I am looking for advice from people who have been in this same situation.

Over the last 4 months I have tried to get a dialogue going over a school application, I have put forward a list of schools in our hometown on more than one occasion and given reasons why I would like our daughter to go to one of those schools. This list includes a school which we both agreed our daughter would attend before our relationship broke down.

Communication is very difficult; I never see my ex-wife and she will only communicate through her solicitor. She has not cooperated over schools and has only yesterday sent a solicitor’s letter giving her intentions.

Her letter says that she intends to go and live “longer term” with her mother and stepfather who live 20 miles away. They also live under a different local authority. My ex-wife has put forward a list of three schools all within 1.5 miles of this address. She is asking for my agreement on these schools and my agreement that she can put down her mother and stepfather’s address as the address for the school application.

I don’t understand how my ex-wife can do this and use her mother’s address for a school application. We currently have a court order in place that gives us 50:50 custody of our daughter and 50:50 use of the family home. We each spend 50% of the time with our daughter and have use of the family home while we are with her. My wife is today living in the family home, she pays her share of the mortgage, the bills and council tax and all her documents are registered at that address.

Does anyone know if this is possible?

@kiddosbedtimealready you have summed up how me and ex spent £££££££.
My concern in this is that the ex's solicitors may not be making her aware of the potential consequences of her current actions, but I recognise that that is not the point of this thread ☹️

I'd tell OP to represent himself. He doesn't need solicitors or counsel for an SIO. So £232. This would, after all, be a simple case. The only question to be decided is whether mum should make a fraudulent application for school places using her parents' address in the hope of getting a place at a school near her parents, or should a non-fraudulent application be made using the address of the FMH for places near the FMH. No complex legal points to be argued.

You appear to attach no weight to the existing CAO, or to OP's reasonable conduct to date.

I do not characterise her wanting to live with or near her mum as a high-risk course of action. However, she is proposing to use an address where her daughter does not live for admissions purposes. That is fraud and is a high-risk course of action.

If you really are a lawyer, I suggest you learn to engage with the facts of the case rather than constantly putting up straw men.

@prh47bridge What could possibly go wrong with a litigant in person facing a resourced solicitor and barrister, with a legal team who are already building the case for the application through pre-action correspondence.

Very brave of you, by the way, to point your clients in the wrong direction, wave them off in a leaky boat, and then watch from a safe distance while the self-captained ship capsizes. If they do make it back to shore seeking an explanation, I bet you tell them the Judge got it wrong! Oh, and you omitted to say what your fee for such sage advice would be.

I can do this all day if you want to @prh47bridge...

It reinforces my point to the OP about how a simple conversation with his ex, maybe even a family mediation, might be the better response (then paying someone for a more scholarly slice of what we are doing here).

It's a fair point, but OP won't know unless he asks. I'd imagine the Ex's solicitors would be unlikely to refuse a family mediation to sort it out long term. It's in everyone's interests to compromise and settle.

With such a simple case, it is unlikely anything would go wrong. She would be applying to be allowed to make a fraudulent application for a school place. Her chances of success are nil, regardless of how well resourced she is. Focus on that - she would be applying to the courts to be allowed to commit fraud. Then explain why he needs a high-powered legal team to combat that.

However, I've grown tired of this. You clearly haven't got a clue. I will continue to give the correct advice but I won't be responding to you any further.

I think in an ideal world both parents need to just sit down and talk about it like reasonable adults.
It seems incredibly contentious and neither of them are going to agree to disagree.
If you take away the fact the FMH is going to be sold, if OP's ex wife was just moving to put distance away from OP and his daughter and using the parents address fraudulently, then yes - throw the book at her.
But the fact of the matter is, she needs to find somewhere else to live. She wants to move to the area where she has the greatest support. It's 20 miles away. Not 200 miles.
The OP's ex wife moving in with her mother and step father is a temporary measure.
I don't actually see her acting in any kind of malicious way,
The OP can't force her to live in the same area as he does.

He's not telling her where she should live but it's unfair for her to expect to just put her DD in a school local to where she's chosen to live and away from her dad and her current town.

Also the fact that OP has tried to discuss this with his ex for several month and had no response except from a lawyers letter stating she wants to put DD in a school near her parents is very telling. Clearly she's not willing to sit down with OP and discuss the situation.

@prh47bridge so, her chances are nil because you declare her a fraudster (for saying she wants to move to her mum's home town and for DD to go to school there).

🫣

That's me standing in the wings of the Court room waiting for this 💩 to hit the fan.

No decent lawyer tells a client that the other side has no prospect of success at all (unless an application is totally with merit). That is quite obviously not the case here. So why say that, save as a Hail Mary for a bad position. And why are you so against discussion/mediation?

If OP was paying for this, what would the bill really be at this stage ££££? 🤔

Tbh I think it is ludicrous them having 50/50 if they can only communicate via solicitors.
@Laurdo I have experienced where I have been pretty much made to stay locally even though I am not from here and the ex saying he is going to stay locally in order to get equivalent equity from house sale, only once I had committed to the area (as there was no choice) he then moved further away to a cheaper area and DC now have to commute and I'm stuck where I would rather not be. This kind of shit happens.

No, I declare her a fraudster because she is proposing to make a fraudulent application. Please try to get your head around that. You are avoiding the most basic facts of this case because it doesn't fit your agenda.

An application to the court to be allowed to make a fraudulent application to the LA for a school place would indeed be totally without merit. The application to the LA must come from the address where the child actually lives - the FMH. The fact the child's mother wants to live somewhere else is irrelevant. She cannot apply from a future address. She can only apply from the address where the child lives.

Please point out where I have said I am against discussion or mediation? Oh wait - I haven't. Yet another straw man from you.

Who does the majority of before and after pre-school care and do you employ nannies, childminders etc.? Who does the school runs? Is everything 50/ 50 Sunday evening until Friday afternoon?

How does the school your ex has suggested compare in terms of Ofsted judgement and progress and attainment data? Is it a better school?

The child is not yet at school.

Since both parents work full time and commute to work, I would assume the child currently attends a daycare nursery near the FMH and they either do week on/week off for taking and collecting her, or they split the week somehow, in order to be achieving the 50/50.

@prh47bridge your strength of conviction feels misplaced given that you only have a few words from the OP to go on and no evidence to study. You haven't seen the letter from the ex's solicitor making the proposals have you? You have no clue what it says.

You haven't thought about the fact it was sent by a solicitor either, have you, so within your unequivocal assessment of fraudulent conduct, that solicitor must be a co-conspirator. Presumably you will be reporting them and their firm to the Solicitors Regulation Authority for conspiring in a dishonest scheme in breach of their fundamental duties in the Code of Conduct.

These are not straw men, they are observations about the obvious deficiencies in your legal analysis, to highlight why cracking on with a half baked application as a litigant in person isn't the best advice to give.

She is asking for my agreement on these schools and my agreement that she can put down her mother and stepfather’s address as the address for the school application

It is right there in the OP. But clearly OP must be lying in your world.

@prh47bridge The OP also says she plans to move in longer term with her mum and step dad. I'm not calling the OP a liar. Unlike you I realise that I would need prima facie evidence of dishonesty, and also recognise the concept of the honestly held but mistaken belief. Your application for proposed application for a single issue would escalate into a full on custody battle over where the child's residence will be in January. Amazing to me that you can't see that.

As I said earlier, I can do this all day, as will the ex's lawyers.

Unlike you I realise that I would need prima facie evidence of dishonesty, and also recognise the concept of the honestly held but mistaken belief.

What makes you think that is unlike me. I recognise the concept of the honestly held but mistaken belief. OP's ex may well honestly believe there is nothing wrong with applying using her parents' address. Her solicitors may not know any different - most solicitors know absolutely nothing about school admissions. But it would, nonetheless, be fraudulent and could result in any place gained by her being removed even after OP's daughter starts school.

Again, please point out where I have said I am against discussion or mediation. Here's a clue. I haven't. I have simply correctly advised OP of the position in regard to school admissions and, so far as it is relevant to admissions, family law. You, on the other hand, have put up straw man after straw man, have claimed I have said things I have not and have been personally abusive, on top of which you have given some clearly incorrect advice.

I will not engage further.

@Trek28

As you are new to the school application process and may be new to MN, it is worth noting that @prh47bridge has been assisting posters with school applications and school appeals for many many years, thoughtfully and with clarity.

I would take his words, along with the words of PanelChair, Collaborate and a couple of other very helpful posters on these boards, as extremely well informed on this topic.

Good luck and I hope you have got some helpful info here.

@prh47bridge classic lawyers stalemate. I'll file a single issue court order application in the morning so we can find out who is right and who is wrong. Apparently this is very cheap to do and Court applications are simple for litigants in person with no legal skills and facing trained lawyers. Also, there's apparently zero costs risk and no down side whatsoever for the applicant. There's someone on MN saying this, so it must be true. We may find out tomorrow! Good night!

Given the extent to which a poster has misrepresented my advice, let me set things out very clearly.

OP and his ex both have parental responsibility. That means they are both entitled to a say in their daughter's education. They should attempt to agree which schools will be named on their application for a primary school place. However, if they cannot agree, whether by direct discussion or mediation, it is open to either side to seek a Specific Issue Order to determine which schools should be named. I am not recommending that the OP does so, nor have I ever recommended that he does so. But, if the parents cannot find any way of agreeing on the choice of schools, it is the mechanism available to either parent to resolve the conflict, with the courts deciding what is in their daughter's best interests.

Contrary to what another poster appears to think, parents can and do apply for and win SIOs without legal advice, even when the other side is represented. However, just to repeat, I am not recommending OP does so. He should try to agree things with his ex and only go to the courts if all else fails.

OP could, of course, agree to his ex's choice of school and her intention to apply using her parents' address. Some on this thread appear to think he should do so. However, he needs to be aware of the consequences.

Applications for school places must use the address at which the child lives. If an application uses any other address is will be treated as fraudulent if the LA finds out. It doesn't matter whether it is a deliberate attempt by the parents to fiddle the system or a misunderstanding. The parents may genuinely believe that it is ok to use a future address, but the LA will still treat it as fraudulent. It is, of course, highly unlikely that the parents will be prosecuted. Such prosecutions are extremely rare. I am only aware of one successful prosecution.

What happens if the LA discover that an incorrect address has been used before places are allocated?

If the mother's parents and the FMH were in the same LA, they would simply use the FMH as the daughter's home address. That would give her little chance of getting into schools 20 miles away. If she was not allocated a place at any of the preferences, she would be offered a place at the nearest school with places available. That could be some distance from the FMH and could be even more than 20 miles from the mother's parents.

In this instance, the mother's parents and the FMH are in different LAs. The LA could still use the FMH to determine admissions, or they could reject the application completely. Even if they processed the application using the FMH, if OP's daughter did not get any of the preferred schools the LA would not be under any duty to offer another place as they are not the daughter's home LA, leaving her without a school at all on offers day.

What happens if the LA don't find out that an incorrect address has been used until after places are allocated?

In this situation, the LA is likely to withdraw any offer that has been made based on the incorrect address. The place can be withdrawn even if OP's daughter has started school. This happens to a few hundred children every year, usually in the autumn term, but occasionally later in the year. The parents would then have to find a school with places available. This is likely to be an unpopular school that may not be convenient for either parent.

It is, of course, possible the LA would not find out that an incorrect address had been used. That would be the gamble OP would be taking if he agrees to his ex's plan.

Great post, prh.

@prh47bridge you shouldn't be offering legal advice on MN for people to rely on.

That's one of my points. You have no instructions, no documentation, and limited information to proceed on, so you have no real basis to know if the advice is sound or negligent in this case on its facts. You are now engaged in a prideful attempt to defend your honour (and how others see you in this forum as a voice with authority on family law matters), because I have challenged you on these points (and perhaps you're not used to that notwithstanding that our legal system is adversarial by design).

I regret having derailed the thread, but I think it's important for MN users to understand that random opinion on this forum is no substitute for proper legal advice.

And I repeat my point to the OP that the only thing certain about aggressive legal action is the cost.

OP - if you are in any way persuaded by @prh47bridge, talk the strategy though face to face first with an independent family lawyer who actually has access to your documents (who is advising you under the ambit of a proper engagement letter, and a professional indemnity insurance policy with cover for professional negligence).

@prh47bridge do you at least agree with that, that OP should first take independent legal advice, or do you think he should rely on your MN posts alone (as the voice with authority)?

@kiddosbedtimealready you are talking only about on the family law aspects and ignoring the schools admissions process aspects of the situation, which are key

I imagine OP can clearly see which poster is here to help him and which is here for a petty dick swinging fight.

In the words of the great Cilla Black, “Ta ra, chuck!”

It's not great, it's inconsistent with what @prh47bridge said yesterday when he thought there was zero chance of failure for OP. Under pressure from me, and having slept on it, he now concedes there is a chance that nothing fraudulent is taking place. But his strategy for OP to pursue an application as a litigant in person was based on his earlier assessment of zero risk of failure.

@prh47bridge is backtracking because his initial advice was wrong. That's my opinion. I'm asserting it loudly as this is what OP will get from his ex's lawyers, so he needs to know that if he goes legal, it is likely to escalate far beyond the single issue of fraud in a school application into a reassessment of all the child's long term needs and care arrangements. You cannot disentangle the issues that easily.

@SheilaFentiman I am trying to help the OP, which is why I keep referring back to him rather than addressing the room for approval like @prh47bridge.

I am sure you mean well, but you are enabling @prh47bridge to provide anonymous legal services in an unregulated fashion on this forum. There are many reasons why that is frowned upon in the trade, as it skirts regulation around client identification, professional indemnity, complaints handling etc.

If @prh47bridge wants to run a pro bono legal advice clinic, he should do it properly, as many do, and not use MN as an anonymous forum without proper oversight or accountability for the advice he is doling outside of proper solicitor/client relations.

It is not inconsistent with anything I said yesterday. I have not backtracked on anything. My advice remains consistent throughout. Any inconsistency is in your own mind - not surprising given you have consistently failed to take the trouble to understand what I've been saying.