After months of waiting we have an appeal hearing this week. I feel like we have prepared as much as possible but wondered if anyone had any advice. it's a bit daunting.
We have been trying to move our child into a school in our new area after a house move last year. Luckily, their old school is just about close enough that we can still make the commute. It is in a different county though. We were initially offered a place in a school that we did not want and we rejected the offer, thinking a place will probably come up in a school we did want. It didn't.
We decided to appeal on the hope we might get somewhere. In our appeal, we perhaps leaned a bit too heavily on soft arguments (journey times, childs personality) that I don't think are going to hold much sway. I have read comments suggesting this on here and I can imagine they are the go to arguments most parents make.
I think we might just have an ace up our sleeve though in that on the most recent rejection from the admissions authority, we were not actually offered any schools.
As I understand it, in the appeal, the burden is on us to prove that the negative impact on our child of the appeal failing outweighs the negative impact on the school of it succeeding. Do we have a strong case if we just say that we have not been given any other option? We would never pull them out of their current school (even though the commute is destroying my soul). But as far as the appeal is concerned the choice is between them going to this school, or going to no school.