LA is bulling me to put daughter in lower year

[NinaKKjones]

I really am desperate for advice,
After a relocation due to a forced move i applied to the local school for a place for my daughter for year 10 it was now March 2019 (year 10 start date was Sept 18).
The school did-not see us untill early May and then REFUSED her a place, did not offer an appeal .
I contacted the LA for help they advised there was no other schools in the area they would ask school to reconsider.
We have now reached July no one has any concern as to school missed and im freaking out .
The LA send me an email to say that The school will offer her a place but in year 9, and i HAVE TO ACCEPT IT NO APPEAL ALLOWED.
And if i dont force my daughter to face this public humiliation i will be prosecuted.

Does any one know where i stand have made a complaint but the LA seem to think despite it proven to be damaging to a child this is acceptable.
No where to turn and still no school place

I have tried out of school areas colleges even looked at how i could fund paying

Why does no one argue the fact that if the only school in the area had accepted her and offered her a place on receipt of my application she would of only missed max 2 weeks work .

Becasue she still will have missed a year at that school, which will have done different topics in year 10. The above is utterly irrelevant to what is NOW in your child's best interests.

This isn't about blame, or you wanting to show them a thing or two, or make up for the fact that she wasn't offered a place straight away - your number one priority should be to ensure the best set of outcomes educationally for your child. Not allocating blame and protestation of 'it's not fair'.

But hey if you and she want to sulk and scream and shout, you go for it. Long term she will suffer. Not them. and probably not you either.

Why does no one argue the fact that if the only school in the area had accepted her and offered her a place on receipt of my application she would of only missed max 2 weeks work

Firstly, your OP and subsequent posts were unclear about the timeline.

Secondly, she would not have missed "max 2 weeks" of relevant work, which is what everyone is trying to tell you. She would have missed 2 terms of relevant work for the particular exam boards the new school use.

Not getting a response over the Easter Holidays isn't unreasonable.

Yes, it would seem that perhaps the admissions authority here should have reacted quicker and they should have explained their reasoning more fully to you when they decided she would be better off going into Year 9 than 10 in May. But they have offered that for a reason; they will know what she has missed, what they teach in Year 10, and they will know its too much for her to catch up.

But the situation now is, you have a child who is going to fail their GCSEs if you try to insist on putting them straight into year 11.

Your other alternatice would be for your dd to go into Year 11 (as you want) but for her then to do an extra year in 6th form to re-do her GCSE's. (our local 6th form college offers a 1 year GCSE re-take course for those who have had adverse circumstabnces/moved from abroad etc etc)

We had something similar happen in the sense that after starting school late, due to my having to fight the LA to place her in a more suitable school DD, she missed a lot of school due to ill health & received minimal support when she was off, so was effectively nearly 2 years behind when she returned.

She went back to her old class/year & though very bright like yours & we knew she would catch up & boy did she put her head down to make sure that she did, she was inspirational & she's set to do well in her GCSEs. BUT I know the anxiety & imposter syndrome that went alongside that. It was like starting school again, as many of her classmates didn't even remember she was there for a short while in year 7 & she was really panicked by how behind she felt she was. Despite more than catching up easily in under 6 months, she still felt constantly stressed & like she was behind & not good enough all of the time & it affected her health.

Unless your DD is amongst the very oldest in her year, then a year below won't feel so different to her as many kids will be at the same development level. The embarrassment factor I suspect is of your own making from your attitude here. You need to talk her up to the idea, not throw a wobbly over how wrong it is. It really isn't.

For the sake of my DDs MH & perhaps had she been a few months younger & not already old for her years, with hindsight, I would have snapped the schools hands off for her to drop down a year, it would have been far less stressful for her & trust me, GCSES are stressful enough

Why does no one argue the fact that if the only school in the area had accepted her and offered her a place on receipt of my application she would of only missed max 2 weeks work .

Apologies, I missed this. Ignore my last post it isn't relevant

I'd do my not in this instance, no, yanbu

Id advise seeing your local councillors, have a read of their CVs online & see which have educational or child experience in any form & go see them.

I did the ombudsman complaint re our LEA & a dodgy appeal. I won, the Ombudsman instructions to offer a school place in our nearest & chosen were completely ignored. Rare this happens unless you live around here😏 but in reality the Ombudsman has no power.

Our local councillor on the other hand made a few calls & DD had her school place the next day.

You could do both, but it can take months & I suspect your councillor would be quicker.

With out her issues, I've also found the Educational Welfare Officer & local Director of Education to be very useful people to contact.

Good luck

Good luck

Where I live since the GCSE Curriculum changed a few years ago options have been chosen in y8 and GCSE curriculum is stretched over 9 to 11 to give kids better chance of passing

But i have a daughter whos weeks off 16 who feels it actually is a public humiliation
who feels that she always tried hard and worked hard and feels like this is a punishment who is the one that will always be whatever the kids choose to label her as

It is your job as her parent to tell her, as often as necessary, that this isn’t true.

Your posts come across as very anxious, almost panicked/aggressive. If this is how you are communicating with your DD you are feeding into her understandable nerves.

This is far from a disaster. I had a young man in my year 11 class last year contract active TB and spend 3 months in hospital and missed another 3 months of school. Aside from the fact that he nearly died. He is now resitting Year 11 at our school which is solely for young men with social, emotional and mental health difficulties. He will be fine. The Year 10 students are actually looking forward to having someone who has “been there done that” (to a certain extent) to talk to to.

OP. I feel for you and your DD, but I do agree with the other posters. Unless you are lucky and the boards are the same, and the set books are the same, and the syllabus have all been taught in the same order, then your DD will have a mountain to climb.

At the point that, for whatever reason, you moved your DD mid way through y10, you impacted her GCSEs. That wasn't your current LA's fault. They are now offering your DD her best chance of success, by letting her start from the beginning in y10. Your DD will come out with better results this way.

She can either lie about her age, or 'own' it and explain she dropped a year due to moving locations. When she turns 17 in y11 she'll be the really 'cool' one, already learning to drive...

You need to help her frame it in a positive light. That's your job as the adult.

What I don’t get is why you’d want her under that pressure to catch up? What if the boards are different and she’s been studying completely different things? What then? I imagine if the LA put her in the correct group and she achieved low grades because she couldn’t catch up you’d complain.

Secondly, she would not have missed "max 2 weeks" ofrelevantwork, which is what everyone is trying to tell you. She would have missed 2 terms of relevant work for the particular exam boards the new school use.

This is what many of us are trying to point out but it's starting to feel very much like one of these threads where people with relevant experiences and trying to offer the best advice and explanations they can to an OP who isn't interested because they think they're right.

The student had done 2 terms of year 10 (not 3 as the OP suggested) so has missed a whole term of y10 in the new school on new specs.

Not getting a response over the Easter holidays is fairly normal. If the school was at or over PAN in the year (I can't recall it it was or if we've had that information) they aren't obliged to exceed it for a student who has moved house. The only times we've gone over PAN midway through GCSE is when we've been directed to take on LAC students who have changed placements or a child with an EHCP has moved into area and we are the named placement.

As it stands, the OP is demanding her DD is admitted to y11 to study 9 or 10 new GCSE courses and thinks the LA and the school have a duty to teach her child the full 2 year course in less than 2 terms when the exams begin in April 2020.

The OP is point blank refusing to see that there is a very valid educational reason to not put a child through that.

At the end of the day, the OP chose to move their child during the middle of their GCSEs. The school and LA are trying to give the student the best possible chance at doing well. It's up to the OP whether they want to accept that or stick their head in the sand.

OP you are not listening to the very sound advice here. It would not be in your child's best interests to try to catch up on her GCSE courses and get worse results simply because of her embarrassment.

You are too focused on the local authority guidelines and rules and not on the very important points:

• schools choose different exam boards and texts within the courses they teach. It is very likely your DD will not be able to catch up a whole year on half her courses or more
• she will therefore get worse results which could massively affect her future - the A levels she can take and her future after school.

You should get over your sense of outrage that just because you moved the school would instantly have places available for your child last year. Very few schools do because most parents avoid, as far as possible, disrupting their children's GCSEs. So they just wouldn't have the vacancies.

I'm not saying this to judge you moving. I am sure you had very good reason to do so but you must have known there was no guarantee of school places at that stage of GCSEs and could easily have checked that with the school first. That's not the local authority or schools fault.

And they are not suggesting she start year 10 again to save money - it will cost them more to give her an extra year of education. They are doing it because it's not in her best interests - she will not get good results. That's bad for her and for their league tables.

As I said earlier, ds1 went back a year when we moved to Scotland, and I promise you, @NinaKKjones, he did not feel humiliated, and no-one at his new school gave him a hard time.

In fact, he benefit d from going back - he went over stuff he’d already covered, and was able to learn the new syllabus at the right pace, not trying to catch up work on his own - and the extra time at school positively benefited him - he was more mature when he took his exams, so he did better in them, which is the direct cause of him having such a good career now.

The humiliation will come at the end of Y11 when she opens her results and has failed to get into 6th form like all her peers.

Repeating Y10 at a different school is not a public humiliation it is the best thing for your child's future. You need to be the grown up and explain that to her.

Have you even checked if the new school can offer your daughter the subjects she wants or if she will have to pick new ones?

It could also be that they school just didn’t have any space in her year, which is why they initially said no.
I understand your daughter feels this very keenly, but they fact is that you really only have 2 choices now:
Homeschool and sit GCSEs in 2020
Start year 10 in new school.