School appeal

[nearden]

Hi,

I am currently appealing for a secondary school and the capacity quoted in the materials received is a lot lower than other council based documents. Would this be a valid argument to use against prejudice of being full? Also does anyone know if a school is made to take students above the PAN by the LEA, do they receive any extra funding?

Any help or advice from someone experienced in this field would be much appreciated.

Thanks

There should be consistency in a maintained school between data held by the school and the LA. Not sure whether you are referring to net capacity or PAN here. The PAN should absolutely be the same in the school information and on the LA website.
It is possible that the net capacity figures can be different because there are a number of actual figures. There is an actual maximum figure of pupils who should be in the school (and even this is regularly exceeded) and there is then a figure which is 90% of that, which is the absolute minimum that should be being quoted. When it comes to an official net capacity figure then that can be any sensible figure which gives a PAN that makes sense between the minimum and maximum. So you could have a net capacity for a 11 to 16 secondary school of 930 maximum and 90% of that is 837. With 5 year groups, a sensible figure would be 180, giving an official net capacity of 900.
In terms of funding, the majority of the funding is based on the number of pupils at each key stage. This is based on the numbers registered at the school in October. So in your example, any pupils over PAN will start in September, start to be counted in October and then receive funding from 1st April for maintained schools and the next 1st September for academies. This can create real difficulties if the school is seeing significant increases in pupil numbers but is the main it is done.

Thanks. That is really helpful.

Just one other question. From the appeal info I've been sent, it appears that the school had reduced its net capacity compared to recent figures published. The new figure is for a hundred less students. As far as i am aware, there hasn't been any loss of building space. Do you know if this is the norm to change the net capacity? Thanks

No it is not.The whole purpose of the net capacity calculation is that it is a standardised method, so there will be reasonable correlation between different schools about how many pupils can be admitted.
If the school has reduced the net capacity, then they should be saying how and why they have done this. It could be that they are taking a different view now of the two figures for capacity that I indicated before but it should be something that is aired at the appeal.
For 100 less pupils, you would be expecting that to have some effect on the PAN of the school. Has the PAN reduced at all?
If you want to pm me with the figures you have I will try and make more sense of them for net capacity and PAN

I've PM'd you some more info :)