Is there any way to call for a school to change its admissions policy?

[peukpokicuzo]

I want to think about this now because by the time it is actually relevant to my family (ds is only 7) it will be too late to do anything about it.

The school in question is an academy in a city centre with an excellent academic reputation and excellent public transport links to every part of the city. Not surprisingly it is massively oversubscribed. It is an academy.

Its admissions policy has the following priorities:

Looked after children and those who have the school named on their ECHP (obviously, no prob with that)

Siblings of those currently at the school.

Everyone else, by lottery.

The problem is that this year, nearly 80% of the spaces were gone by the time the sibling places had been allocated. So any elder sibling or only child has an almost negligible chance of getting one of the tiny number of remaining places.

Sibling priority makes sense for primary schools - obviously when a parent has to deliver and collect their children at the school gate they can't be in two places at once. But for a senior school where pretty much every pupil (apart from those with additional challenges) arrives by bus unaccompanied by a parent - what justification is there for giving so many places to siblings?

I think this policy should be challenged but I don't know how - who decides and who has influence. Do challenges like this ever succeed?

If it's the school I think it is, the sibling priority works in both directions. I know families who have got places for the younger/youngest sibling, which then puts the older sibling at the top of the waiting list for any vacant places coming up in other years. Do teachers' children still get priority too?

To be honest, that school is so popular that whatever admissions system they have, some people are going to be unhappy/disadvantaged. I presume that children from the attached primary are not going to have first dibs on secondary admission, or there really would be an outcry.

I'd say there's no harm in trying, but given that sibling priority is pretty standard at secondary level, I wouldn't rate your chances.

Was there a massive party one year when all the parents got drunk and had sex when they got home? Hence the enormous sibling numbers for that year?

I have two children (currently at primary) and I agree with you OP, sibling rules for primary are fine but not necessary at secondary. My 2 siblings and I all went to different secondary schools (due to living in an area with grammar schools and many single sex schools) and it wasn't a problem, not that my parents had any choice in the matter. Secondary school aged children mostly take themselves to school. For the summer holiday it would be mostly the same, fair enough there might be the odd week here and there at Easter / half terms which don't match which is a bit of pain, but all in all I think the system is unfair for non-siblings.

If proposed locally I would certainly oppose breaking the sibling link for all of the reasons talked about up the thread.

I don't see how it is unfair for parents with only 1 child. You still have the issues of getting the pfb in whether eldest or only.

Its interesting that siblings take up so many places. At the school my eldest DD has just been allocated siblings places counted for less than 20% of the total allocation and its an outstanding school. I think so high a % is very unusual.

I presume that children from the attached primary are not going to have first dibs on secondary admission, or there really would be an outcry.

I don't know what school it is but a lot of schools do have direct feeder schools and they are usually pretty high up the admissions criteria. There is one near my parent's that has a direct feeder school.

But if it's a lottery for the rest of the places - then surely without the sibling rule it would be very difficult to get both your children into the same school (even if you lived across the road)...

I'd check other years results as well to see if this is an anomaly - but overall it doesn't actually sound unfair to me.

If it is the school within my LEA then there are also places allocated in other categories as well e.g. specialist places. Most of the dcs I know who go there seem to have been offered places under this category.
I don't think the difficulty is the sibling places necessary but
a) this school has a smaller number of places available for Y7s than most other secondary schools locally. Schools with small PANs do seem to be affected more by the sibling link than other schools.
b) they take applications from a large area (including from the LEAs just outside our city).
I think that there should really be a distance limit for category b applications and perhaps this is what the OP should campaign for.
However as OPs ds is still relatively young, there are no guarantees that the application system for the school won't change anyway.

Should read "I don't think the main difficulty is necessarily the sibling places...."

There is a problem with this admission policy in that the first child of a family living right next door to the school may not get in if they do not win the ballot. Lots of parents would not be happy to find ballot winners living 15 miles away getting in over them if they lived very close to the school and it could be considered their local school. A catchment area would help with this. The Governors could consider this amendment.

60% of DSs year group at school had elder siblings - I can believe it happening.

In a big city having kids at different schools can work
in rural areas - catchments many miles across - its a nightmare

Have 2 schools in my area like this and yes it is a tiny percentage who actually get a place under the lottery criteria.

There are other criteria that can come before the lottery. Chorister (if its a religious school), specialism like music, staff/employees of the school, medical/social need (not so secret way for professionals to use a few letters from their chums to get priority), ... Some schools seems to get the lottery places down to just a few children.

My DC school got rid of the siblings criteria for children out of catchment. That stopped those wealthy mobile types moving in for a year just to bag the school for all their children.

If you do not have a catchment, you cannot ban children out of catchment. If you have two children very close in age, moving for three years, say, is not a huge hardship. Then they move away. I do think catchment is important and should come before lottery.

I tend to agree with you. I think the benefits of sibling priority at secondary level are hugely overstated and can have some perverse, probably unintended consequrences, but it's compatible with the admissions code to give priority to siblings. So, if you want to start a campaign to get the oversubscription criteria changed, you'll have to find some convincing arguments to present to the governors and/or LEA (depending on which is the admissions authority).

Parents evenings and other events not so much because there is usually a different day for different year groups anyway.

School A where your year 7 child is decides to ave year 7 parents' evening on the 10th of X.

School B where your year 9 is picks the same date for its year 9 parents' evening.

I wonder whether you might perhaps approach from the angle of maybe having a priority admissions area for siblings, or maybe one about priority for siblings if families remain in the same address as when first sibling was admitted?

This was introduced some years ago quite locally, because families tended to do a short-term move to get the eldest child in, then move miles away into cheaper accommodation, with siblings being bussed in for miles and miles while people a few hundred metres from the schools in question couldn't get places.