Secondary appeals - group hearings

[ImASecretTwigletNibbler]

Just heard that our appeal will be a group hearing for the admission authority's case presentation. Am 99% sure I'm over-thinking this but is this likely to help or hinder the individual applicants or will it make no difference at all? Things going through my head are... it could go in our favour if another parent brings up an issue that I hadn't considered and they may be able to prove the school isn't full even if we can't.... how would that extra place/places then be allocated though - would it go to the most deserving case after all appeals have been heard? I'm also concerned because I simply LOATHE speaking in public and would be really nervous to ask questions and try and pick holes in their case in a room full of people! (guess I just have to get over myself with that one though).

Is this a case of the LA presenting their case so they do not have to keep repeating it to all appellants? I do not think you are expected to present your case at this time because you will be seen by the appeal panel not the LA. The LA has the right to be present at the appeal but they may see this as a more cost effective way of doing things if there are lots of appeals.

I am sure someone with more knowledge of this will be along soon. In my LA (when I worked on appeals) we did not do this. We (the LA) would also be asked questions by the panel during the appeal on issues arising during the appeal process, either raised by the parents or the panel itself. As far as I am aware, you will get the right to present your appeal to the panel, but this talk may give you more background information and allow you to question the LA on the contents of their presentation.

A group hearing is designed so that the LA don't have to present their case for each individual appeal and the panel don't have to get bored stiff hearing it and asking the same questions every time.

Yes, it is possible another parent will bring up an issue you haven't considered but even with individual appeals the panel will consider the effect of any new information that emerges on all appeals.

In the decision making process the panel will first look at each case individually and decide whether the appeal should succeed or fail. If they then find they have more successful appeals than the school can handle they start comparing cases to decide who has the strongest case for admission.

Don't worry about speaking in public. You don't have to say anything in the group hearing. Your appeal won't suffer just because you haven't asked any questions. However, if you think a mistake was made in the way your child's application was processed you must bring it up in the group hearing. If it is something specific to your application the appeal panel may tell you to leave it and bring it up in your individual hearing but if there is any reason to believe it may have affected more than one applicant they will want to discuss it while everyone is together.

We don't do grouped appeals for stage 1 in my authority, and I've always thought it must be quite intimidating if people want to question the LA in front of a room full of strangers.

Panelists in my area discussed this recently. While there are some advantages, we felt on balance that it was onerous to expect parents to attend twice. We also thought that mouthy confident people would dominate and the ones with poor confidence or poor English would feel intimidated. We also thought that while it was boring for us (and the presenter) to hear the same thing 20 times, the parents deserved our one to one attention. Ours rarely go over 20 for one school, if there were 50 it might have to be grouped.

I did this last year and won. We were called in as a group, they put their side of the story over we all asked questions as a group and then we were asked to leave. We all then has an individual meeting were we put our cases forward and they asked questions.

I won. Still makes me very excited to say it, lol

Sorry I was unclear. The individual meetings were all directly after the group meeting.

Don't worry about speaking in public. You don't have to say anything in the group hearing. Your appeal won't suffer just because you haven't asked any questions.

I do have things I really want to ask but the thought of challenging them in public makes me feel sick. I guess I can write down what I want to ask and get my DH to speak!

Thanks, tiggy. If someone is able to prove that the school isn't really full, or that the school can go over PAN with no problems, how would a panel decide how many extra children it can accept?

They have to form an opinion based on the facts presented. There is no laid down way of doing this so the panel is expected to apply common sense. For example, if the school has regularly gone 5 over PAN without problems the panel can reasonably assume it can go at least that far again. The panel will be looking at things like class sizes and sizes of rooms. The larger the class size gets and the smaller the rooms available the more nervous the panel will be about admitting additional pupils.

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So if they decide that the school can go 5 over PAN, would those 5 come from the appeals, or from people on the waiting list who aren't appealling?

They would go to the people who are appealing, because you can only be admitted from the waiting list if there is a space. If the panel decides the school could 'take 5 more' they aren't saying there are 5 spaces, they're simply saying that the school/other pupils would not be as disadvantaged by 5 more pupils being admitted than those 5 pupils would be disadvantaged by being refused a place.

equally, if the panel thought that the school could 'take 5 more' but only 3 appellants made a sufficiently strong case that they needed a place at that school, then only 3 appellants would be admitted, even though the school 'could'cope with 5. It isn't enough to be present at the appeal -you have to convince the panel that your child really needs to go to that particular school.

Ah, that makes sense, lougle, thank you. Ugh, I can't wait until all this is over.

I think we need to be very clear about the process that is adopted for admission appeals when it is a grouped appeal. The LA or admission authority present their case once in front of all the people who are appealing. The parents then can ask all the questions that they wish to of the admission authority. This is obviously something that has to be handled carefully and it is the Chair of the admission appeal panel who has a job to do here, so that everybody has the opportunity to ask every question they wish to. I will always specifically ask each person whether they have any questions.
Almost invariably there will be one or more parents who want to do a lot of questioning and quite often will start to stray into their own personal case but again that is where the chair needs to be strong and stop that happening. Once all questions have been asked by parents the panel members ask question and whilst this is not laid down I will always go back to the parents after panel questioning and ask whether our questions have raised any further thoughts in their minds.
At that point stage 1 finishes and the panel need to make some decisions. The first is whether the admission arrangements complied with the mandatory requirements of the school admission code and and part 3 of the school standards and framework act 1998. This is in effect saying is there anything illegal about the admission arrangements. It would be highly unusual for this to be the case but does happen occasionally. The next question is whether the admission arrangements were correctly and impartially applied, which is whether any of the parents are alleging that there has been a mistake made. In many instances this may well become a major point of discussion in part 2 for some or all of the appellants but it does need to be at least raised in part 1.
The the panel decide whether the admission of additional children would prejudice efficient education or the efficient use of resources. To prove this the admission authority must be able to demonstrate prejudice over and above the fact that the published admission number has been reached. The key point here is that it is whether it is prejudice to the school considering all the admission appellants, not individual ones. That is the panel if they are so minded, has to be sure that there is no prejudice to the school in admitting all the appellants. If they feel there is some prejudice to the school then they must proceed to stage 2 of the appeal.
At the second stage of the appeal, the panel hear each individual appeal in turn.
When the panel have heard all the appeals they make decisions about which if any appeals have more prejudice to the appellant than it does to the school. They might have heard 20 appeals and decide that 5 reach the bar for admission. They then decide whether they are happy to admit all 5 or whether the prejudice to the school would be sufficiently high at some stage that they would not admit any more pupils. So it could be that they decide that the school could cope with 3 but no more. At that point the panel review the 5 they believed passed the admission bar and decide which are the three strongest cases and admit those, rejecting all the others.
This process explains why it is so important to try and reduce the level of prejudice to the school in the first stage because the lower the height of the prejudice level the more likely it is that more cases of the appellants will meet the criteria.
The other thing to say is that this is the process of what is termed an "ordinary" case and that when we are talking about infant class size regs cases different procedures exist.

That was so useful, thank you, admission.