Buckinghamshire Council Home Visit during Primary Application for Address Check

[Rockclimber67]

Hello -
We think we will be in a position where we own a property and are renting another at the same time (in Amersham)

We are hoping to get into Chestnut Lane school. In these circumstances would Bucks council do a home visit to check the 'main address'?

Thanks!

I don't live in this area but in another where there is high demand for good school places, particularly at secondary. What you perhaps don't realise yet is just how much the claws come out of parents over school places, particularly if parents have made big sacrifices to move into an area to secure a school place (selling up, stretching themselves on mortgages etc) to find others have gamed the system.

If you did do this, and I absolutely don't recommend it, you would need to make sure nobody knew because I can guarantee someone will dob you in and all it would take is for one person to do so.

I know someone who called admissions this year over a family who put their parents address down to get into a secondary school because they were closer. I don't know what exactly happened but my DC said the child isn't going to that school anymore!

Also how would you explain living between two addresses in the same area? Who on earth can afford to do that in this day and age! Eyebrows will be raised to the skies!

What everyone else said.
This would be application fraud to use a temporarily rented address.

If the school is so desirable the option you have is to bite the bullet and sell and rebuild closer, even if it would be a smaller home.

For a start you are foolish putting it on here where posters have already said they live in the area. So when someone doesn’t get a school place at their closest school and they are telling their friend or a stranger in the park the information that someone has fraudulently tried to get a school place is out there. So I can’t see how you are going to keep it a secret. It’s already not a secret.

My BIL did this using his wife’s mother’s address and another parent reported them after seeing my SIL parking on her mums drive every morning and then walking over to the school. This was when my niece was in the school’s nursery but had been allocated a reception place. The LEA asked for a lot of evidence and the place was withdrawn and embarrassingly they of course then had to go to the admissions that had withdrawn the place to apply for a place at another school. Whatever was left over.

Ugh. Entitled appalling behaviour

Our local authority require the address you are applying with to be the address that your current school/preschool/childcare has for you, that you have registered at the GP/dentist/hospital with, that is the address on Child Benefit correspondence and where your child is registered for other council services such as swimming lessons and library card.

It is not about choosing one of many addresses at which the child’s parent pays council tax.

What you are proposing is admissions fraud and you will get found out - Bucks are super hot on this. For secondary they apply a rule that if you are renting or “living elsewhere” but you own another property within 20 miles, then you are using an address of convenience. They will use your owned property address for school admissions.

This is what it says on the website

Good luck cheating the system. No we haven't done that. And you shouldn't be able to with this set up. So easy to spot for authorities.

You wont pull this off OP, the school you have named is on a flagged list for Bucks CC for more than the usual regulatory checks for this exact behaviour.

You're not the only person to have tried this process to get a school place at CL, the Council and Governers are well aware of it, Governors know the local catchment very well and make it a mission to ensure local families that live in the community are allocated without fraudulent means.

It's been an issue for years at this school and they are well aware that families in Amersham are afluent enough to pay for dummy address for application only.

Good luck, all Amersham primaries are good schools, I would apply to your catchment school and follow the process everyone has to comply with.

OP, this is fraud. Do not do this.

What is so special about this school?

You have no chance of convincing Bucks that you genuinely require 2 houses within a mile of each other. They will use the house you own as your main residence. Even if you fully move in, this is unlikely to make a difference unless you have sold your house.

Your choices are sell your house before January or make a genuine application from your current address. The third option, commit fraud and get caught, isn't one I'd recommend.

I don't live in the area, but I would say don't get caught up in the hype with primaries. Often the most sought-after remain top because motivated families fight so hard to get into them. My children are thriving in a more mixed primary that's probably just as good as the sought-after ones nearby. The school's overall results will be lower, but my DC should get top results regardless.

Hopefully you’d be reported by someone for doing this, because renting a house just to get into a school is pretty crappy. They do usually check where your main residence is, which would be your house you own, so hopefully yes, they would discover you were fraudulently trying to get into a school and refuse you. And if not, I’m sure another parent whose spot you’d taken would happily offer this information as soon as it became known

Given OP has disappeared, hopefully she has taken the point and will either stay where she is and put this one down as an aspirational first choice with her nearest school also as a banker. Or she is making plans to actively sell her current house.

This thread is almost certainly not written by the person contemplating the fraud….

Yes I did wonder about that too

but it does go on, there’s loads of it where I live and the parents are quite open about it

Imagine thinking you and your child are so important that you would deliberately contribute to denying a school place to another child who genuinely lives in the catchment area. Money talks I guess. I hope you get caught, but I feel bad for your child.

Have you checked last year's allocation of places and whether you would have got a place at your main address? Primary school rolls are falling in the south so it may be that your chances of getting a place from that address are improving.

This happens all the time in Bucks. Certain families do this to get a foothold into the grammar schools. I know families that have done similar.

I work at a Bucks school. Years ago, when everyone claimed child benefit, we had a parent who tried this. Another parent contacted Bucks and the child benefit address was investigated. Bucks withdrew the offer of a place.

Totally agree. It’s the same for secondary schools here.

There are a couple of highly sought after grammar schools near me. DC1 should have got into one of them but didn’t and went to the local comp and got mostly 9s at GCSE. They were offered a place for 6th form at the grammar but then we realised that the A-Level classss at the grammar had 30 kids in them and DC1 decided to turn the place down and stay at the comp. In the comp, the 6th form was so small that DC1’s biggest A-Level class (maths) had only 10 kids in it. For their other subjects, it was 6, 3 and 2. DC1 came out of there with 4xAstar and a place at Imperial College. They could scarcely have done any better.

Some schools are just good at marketing and have managed to cultivate an amazing reputation that probably isn’t as good as reality (I have heard some horror stories from people who have run clubs in the grammar and also there was a suicide). Others, like DC1’s comp, have a very low profile but are actually brilliant.

I’m surprised that OP has posted this. It’s pretty obvious that the proposal is an attempt to obtain a place at a preferred school fraudulently and I would have expected that research would have shown that it’s not acceptable.

Arguably, this is research!

That is clear admissions fraud. It is unlikely to succeed. The council will use the address of the house you own. If, for some reason, they overlook this and offer you a place at your preferred school, they can take that place away when they find out even if your child has already started school. They will find you a place elsewhere, but that is likely to be at an unpopular school which could be a long way from home.