Harris Crystal Palace appeals experience anyone?

[StOlaf]

Hi, does anyone have any experience with admissions appeals to Harris Crystal Palace?

My son didn't get any of his preferred schools and ended up allocated to a religious school (we're secular) miles away that we didn't even know existed. Harris Crystal Palace, an oversubscribed academy, was his first choice. We live within the catchment area as does his father, where he spends half the week - in fact his father is about a quarter-mile from the school.

Grrr... so frustrating.

Any tips, advice etc welcome.

Thanks!

Admission appeals are the same everywhere. There are two ways you can win. One is to show that a mistake has been made and your son should have been admitted. The other is to show that the prejudice to your son through not being admitted to this school outweighs the prejudice to the school in taking on an additional pupil. Unless you think a mistake has been made you need to start thinking about what features there are at Harris Crystal Palace which will be of particular benefit to your son and which are not present in the allocated school. The fact that the allocated school is miles away won't necessarily make for a winning case unless there are reasons why the journey is particularly difficult for your son.

The obvious question is what address was used for the application, yours or fathers. It should have been the one that is where he spends the majority of the school week.
However Harris use a banding system, based on a test allocating all potential pupils to a band depending on ability. They then do a ballot for the available places in each band.
My guess would be that it will not be easy to win an appeal for Harris unless they have made a mistake in the process. The first thing i would ask is what band your son was in, how many were allocated to that band and how many were admitted from the band.

All very good points - thank you for taking the time to reply.

@prh47bridge - I'm not sure how to tell if a mistake has been made. Any pointers on what I should look for?

@admission - I asked about banding test results and the person on the other end of the phone line said they don't give that information out. Hmmm... I will try again. As for where he spends the most of the week, it's been 50/50 and we both live within 2 miles of the school, which is their catchment.

Aside from appealing to the academy, I have strong objections to sending my son to a Catholic school. I guess I should bring that up to the council...

Looking at the admission criteria, the possible areas for a mistake would seem to be:

• Placing you in Zone B when you should have been in Zone A
• Failing to give sibling priority if it applied

There are other possible mistakes such as placing your son in the wrong band but it only helps if your son would have been admitted if the mistake hadn't been made. It would be hard to prove he had been placed in the wrong band and, given the way it works, impossible to show he would have been admitted if he had been in the right band.

As you don't mention a sibling that really just leaves placing you in the wrong zone, so check whether they put you in Zone A or Zone B. Even then, an appeal panel may take the view that putting your son in the right zone doesn't mean he would have been admitted and therefore it isn't grounds for a successful appeal.

They must tell you what band your son was in, how many were in that band and how many were admitted from the band. If they refuse point out to them that they will have to disclose this information if you appeal.

I don't know anyone who has managed a successful appeal at Harris Crystal Palace. The banding and lottery seem to make appeals very, very difficult.

Have you been offered St Mary's in Croydon? It seems to be a popular "final option" for Croydon Council. You need to get your dc on waiting lists asap.

@prh47bridge - many, many thanks for your very rational approach. Will try and try again.

@Caoimhe - Yes, St Mary's in Croydon. I was told by Harris that Croydon applications get put on the waiting list at Harris CP automatically. I will follow up to ensure that that is indeed true.

Taking deep breaths...

Cheers!

Not surprised by that StOlaf - the Council are quite predictable!

As far as I know you can put your ds on the waiting list for any school even if it wasn't on your original list.

The good news is that St Mary's is not über Catholic but that is because most Catholic parents avoid it.

Fingers crossed for your appeal and/or waiting list movement!!

Agree, make sure you are on Harris CP waiting list. You might get in that way - my DS did, 3 years ago.

St Marys is one of the council's fallbacks because it is undersubscribed. There are plenty of non-Catholic kids there - both the ones I know are Muslim. It is a crappy but improving school and it might be worth talking to the school to find out how Catholic it is in practice and whether you would really find it impossible. I have to say I wouldn't send my kids there but any level of faithiness is a dealbreaker for me. The dealbreaker for a lot of the middleclass Catholic parents is that it is not at all a middleclass school.

You could also see if you could get into one of the other Harris schools in the borough or Harris Merton. They are not in anything like the same league as Crystal Palace but they are likely to improve over the coming years.

So, found out a couple of things - Croydon automatically put students on the waiting list for any "higher preferences" where said student was not accepted - which in my son's case is all SIX of them. So that's good.

AND, I had to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to Harris CP to get the information about which zone and band my son was placed in because it's not the school's policy to give out that info willy nilly to the parents of the students who were not admitted... even though they release the information at appeal.

Can they be more obstructive?

I would possibly feel sorry for St Mary's but obviously lacking strong leadership. I phoned to arrange a visit, a message was taken by an uncertain receptionist and phone call never returned.

If you want to really start asking awkward questions then the two to ask are firstly what is the process undertaken to choose the successful pupils in each band and how do they prove that process was undertaken. Second question how can they prove that your child's name was in the velvet bag (or whatever process that they have) because you think that they missed it out!
I would suggest that you keep those for the appeal or at least until a bit further down the process and you can see how things are going. One thing I would ask now is how if you are on the waiting list are places allocated as and when they become available. I will be very interested to see what they say as this is a bit of a grey area.

Ooooo... @admission, you are pushing all the right buttons with me. I heart awkward questions.

I shall keep those in my back pocket, and let you know about the waiting list if they deem the query worthy enough to answer.

I think you are very clever, indeed, and may have more than a little bit of experience with this whole process. My deepest gratitude to you and your willingness to share your knowledge and insight with me.

This is my first dabble with mumsnet and I am very impressed with everyone who's contributed. All input welcome!

xx

They had better answer the question about the waiting list. They have to publish their admission arrangements. That includes how they will administer the waiting list.

For your information, Admission regularly sits on and chairs appeal panels. You may also hear from Panelmember who also sits on appeal panels. I don't sit on appeal panels but I do know the admissions and appeal processes pretty well for my sins.

Hi,

I've received the appeals guidance and form from Harris CP in the post today. It has a very detailed explanation of the admissions process, in particular how the remaining places (after those that are selected by technological aptitude which is the school's specialism, SEN, looked after children and siblings) are allocated:

"The remaining places in each ability band will be allocated by the drawing of lots in 2 geographical zones. Zone A will be a zone up to 2 mile radius from the fixed point; Zone B will be a zone over 2 miles radius from the fixed point... The first nine places in each ability band shall be available for applicatns drawn by lot from Zone A, the tenth place shall be available for applicants drawn by lot from Zone B, the next nine places shall be available for applicants drawn by lot from Zone A, the next single place shall be available for applicants drawn by lot from Zone B, etc. until all places in that ability band are allocated or until all applicants in that ability band are placed. This will result in a provisional allocation of places to Zone A."

It then goes on to say:

"Because the intention of the process is to allow 10% of the available places to be allocated to applicants from Zone B and the operation of the procedure above may result in fewer than 10% of the available places being allocated to applicants from Zone B, there will be a seond phase to the procedure to ensure that 10% of the places are allocated to those applying from Zone B."

It then goes on to describe that process of how they will remove Zone A applicants already allocated spaces to make room for Zone B applicants in order to achieve that 90/10 split.

Number of applications received: 2125
Number of places availalbe: 180
Less number of SEN: 8
Less looked after children: 4
Less siblings: 49

Number of places left to allocate: 119

This doesn't make for good odds.

The odds are better than you think. Some of the applicants will have received offers from schools they wanted more than this one. Most of the failed applicants will not appeal. And the appeal panel only has to consider those that do appeal.

The process stated seems unnecessarily convoluted and still doesn't say anything about how they handle the waiting list. Admission's other questions are still valid - how exactly are lots drawn and how can they prove that your child was included.

@prh47bridge - My gratitude for your advice and support. It's barely just begun and I'm already feeling the stress.

Here is the waiting list bit.

"Places for admission which are declined or otherwise become vacant will be offered to those on the Waiting List who are in the same band as that in which the position has been vacated."

But no mention of whether that is random or not... how lots drawn etc.

Re: the 90/10 geographical split. They state is an "intention" but not a binding requirement then actually take Zone A applicants off the list to make room for Zone B in order to get that magic ratio. This seems extraordinary to me.

And then (in a bit I didn't type out so as not to exhaust everyone) in the bands which have a lower percentage of Zone B applicants, they add a place in that band for Zone B by taking one away from Zone A and the re-drawing the whole lot from Zone A. This continues until the ratio has been achieved. Talk about convoluted.

If they know how many applicants they have and how many places and the distriubtion amongst the bands, why can't they figure out how many to draw from each zone from the start?

As you say, this seems ridiculously complex. However, the complexity of the system does not of itself give you a case for appeal. But it increases the scope for mistakes. And if they haven't followed exactly the system described in their admission arrangements the appeal panel should sit up and take note. That doesn't necessarily mean your appeal would succeed, of course, but every little helps.

What a nightmare of a system, my head hurts already just reading it.
The school does have to end up with a 90/10 ratio of zone a/ zone b because that is what the admission criteria says will happen, but they do seem to be making it awfully complicated. I don't understand how it can be an "intention" it says places wil be allocated in that ratio, so it is requirement.
What is not clear is how the 10% of places for pupils with aptitude for technology are chosen, other than this seems to be before the banding exercise. The admission number of 180 and with 9 bands, it does not take a genius to work out that this means that for each band the number of pupils is 20, that is you end up with 18 from zone a and 2 from zone b.

@admission - the technological aptitude is determined also by test. In my FOIA request I asked for them to send me my son's results. I'm still puzzled that I had to use the FOIA to get personal information about my son.

@prh47bridge - I will appeal, not because I think I will win, but on principle... we have 4 schools within 2 miles of our home and we get the school that is 4 miles away. I know distance is not considered a strong basis for appeal (which, frankly, is DAFT that it isn't because it affects so many aspects of a child's well being), but it's simply wrong, wrong, wrong.

OK, rant over. Thanks again for your help and opinions.

Go for it. When the case to refuse admission arrives post an outline of it here and you will get plenty of help in coming up with awkward questions to ask. You will also get plenty of help in making your own case as good as possible.

I've only received one letter from a school explaining why my son was refused admission - the other five have not bothered to send anything yet.

Thanks again for all your support - I'll keep updating.

Hi, I'm looking at the appeals form and yet I don't have the full information to set out the reasons for appeal as I have yet to hear from the school with the relevant information (and it looks like they don't have to get back to me with that info until the appeals deadline has passed).

How specific do I have to be in the initial appeals form? Can someone talk me through it?

Thanks!

Found some info from the Academy, wondering if it has any relevance:

1. The Harris City Academy Crystal Palace opened on 1 September 2007 with a Published

Admission Number relating solely to students in Year 7 and Year 12. Students in subsequent Years have been transferred automatically from the predecessor school, Harris CTC, which closed on 31 August 2007.

1. During the period from 1 September 2007 to the admission of Year 7 in September 2011 to the

Academy there will not be a Published Admission Number against which to consider applications for admission to all Year groups. Initially in September 2007 there will be four such year groups reducing by one in each subsequent academic year.

1. Admission to Year groups without a Published Admission Number will be based upon the size of

teaching groups already existing in the Academy and the efficient use of resources.

1. There will be a right of appeal to the Independent Appeal Panel for unsuccessful applicants.

The short answer is no. It simply indicates the process being used for admission to years other than the normal year of entry. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with it. As you are applying for the normal year of entry it is not relevant.

On your earlier question, on the appeal form you should concentrate on the reasons you believe this is the right school for your son - what are the features this school has which are not present in the allocated school and which will be of particular use to your son. The questions you've asked the school are more about finding holes in the case to refuse admission. You can bring that up at appeal when the school present their case. It doesn't have to be in your initial submission. You can also submit additional evidence (and, indeed, change your written case) at any time prior to the appeal, although you shouldn't leave it to the last minute. The one thing you should avoid doing is turning up to the hearing with significant documentary evidence that you haven't sent in previously as that may result in the appeal being adjourned to allow the panel and the school to read this new evidence.