School offer withdrawn

[Khushi12]

My daughter got admission in a faith school for year 7. We accepted the offer on March 5 by calling the school directly (kept a snap-shot) in my mobile. The school said everything is fine, and they will inform us about all the procedures by month of May. Friday, 9th March, we got an email attachment stating that offer has been withdrawn due to administrative error. My daughter is devastated and so do we.

Having been away for a few days I can see this problem is still an current. Having worked out which school we are talking about I can only say that this admission criteria is a train smash waiting to happen, because of the number of layers that are involved in how the places are allocate and I would not be surprised if this kind of problem happened each year. It is certainly the case that the admission criteria has been the same since at least 2016.
For me it is quite simple as to who is to blame for these mistakes and this is the governing board of the school. The mechanism applied for working out the order of places offered is that the LA send a large spread sheet to the school with all applicants on it, whether they were first preference or not. It is then the responsibilities of a committee of the governing board to sort out exactly how the places will be allocated (which in its own right will be a major challenge) and then allocate the places in the right order. That ordered list is then sent back to the LA and they then apply their computer system in terms of equal preference etc between different schools to end up with the final order of admission.
So if the the governing board got their admission order criteria right then the 240 places should have been allocated in the right order. So my conclusion is that the school made the mistake.
Given the admission number is 240, then it seems to me that to take an extra 30 pupils is going to be the easiest option rather than what will become a contentious and frankly argumentative appeals process. For the school it is currently a definite lose- lose position, which they could turn into a win-win situation by admitting the 30 pupils who they say were wrongly offered the places.

How are things going Khushi ?

Following Prh's comment, we wrote an email to school and council to know more about the administrative error: "according to the school's published admission arrangements, there is a fixed number in each category which is not dependent on the number of applications and the numbers were the same this year as for at least the last two years. Therefore, if the LA used last years numbers, the result should have been correct." But there was no response from any of them.

We are now preparing for our appeal process. In the meantime, we now know the PAN and reserved places for all the faith categories - the information that we have requested from the school.

Keep us posted. Happy to help in any way I can.