School admissions transport help

[Hump12]

We got our result for secondary school admission yesterday. Our first and second choice were schools in our home town that my daughter liked best. We did not put the nearest school (1 mile away) on the form as my daughter did not like it and the other two schools in my opinion are better and also the nearest school is C of E and we are not religious and there was an clear religious element when we visited. We put two grammars as 3rd and 4th choice as she narrowly missed out in the Kent test and we cannot appeal to them if they are not on the form. The school we have been allocated was not on our form at all and is 13 miles away. Having looked into travel it will cost us a substantial amount per year for a school bus. (The allocated school is in a rural location and the opposite direction to where I work so driving her is not an option) If she got a local school she would be driven and the second grammar is in the town I work in so again I could drive her. I cannot figure out whether I will be responsible for the cost of transport to the allocated school if our appeals are not successful. Any advice would be much appreciated.

You get free transport in that situation. As long as you included your nearest school as one of your choices, you are entitled to free transport if you end up being allocated a school that is more than 3 miles away.

I’m not sure it is a quirk of the Kent system tbh, it could be happening at Academies all over the country for all I know. It’s selection by the back door and the whole reason it’s happening here in Kent is so academy high schools can ‘compete’ with grammar schools. They can offer a ‘grammar stream’ (which they call an ‘accelerated learning’ stream) and select via their, apparently, totally legitimate, Banding Assessment test to get the students who couldn’t get places in the grammar schools but also wouldn’t have otherwise qualified for these local high schools. No one wins from this back door selection except the academy trusts business models.

Fair banding is not selection by the back door. Rather the opposite. It is intended to ensure that the school is truly mixed ability. It ensures the school gives as many places to pupils of middle and lower ability as they do to high achieving pupils. The people who win are the pupils of all abilities who get places at a school where they would otherwise miss out because their parents can't afford to buy a house right next to the school. Since high achievers are more likely to come from better off families, if academies didn't use fair banding the likely outcome would be that more of their intake would be high achievers.

Academy trusts are not businesses. They are charities.

No idea where you’re from or what schools that have this system in place you are familiar with, but, the two academy schools I am specifically basing my opinion on are not in areas with an, overall, well off demographic. The pupils nearby, who could have walked to the local schools in question in less than ten minutes, are not from families that live there because they can ‘afford’ it, it’s an established community of people whose children went to the local primary schools that previously (ie prior to this change in admission policy) could have expected to have been admitted to their local high school. Instead there are significant numbers of them now being bussed out to out of area schools. This is very much because those schools are competing for academically able students who might otherwise have chosen to go to the grammar schools out of area. They may not be ‘businesses’ but this is a business decision. ‘Fair’ banding sounds very much like a rebranding tbh. Maybe it’s different in non grammar areas.

Fair banding has been around for at least 15 years. Some campaigners pushed for all schools to adopt it on the basis it would give pupils from poor backgrounds a better chance of gaining entry to high performing schools.

Most of the academies in Kent that use fair banding use distance as the tie breaker. Most of those that don't prioritise pupils living within their catchment area. I can only find one that reserves a proportion of places for those living outside their catchment.

For your allegation to work, the schools concerned must be getting a lot of applications from high performing pupils living outside the immediate area and few from such pupils living close to the school. Is that what you are saying?

They will have allocated your closest school to those who applied, before allocating any remaining places to people such as yourself who did not apply but had no other place.

So there may be people who live further away than you do who listed it, and got a place.

But at the point your place was considered they had become fully or over-subscribed.

However, you should be high up the waiting list if you live relatively close.

Better to be at a poorly performing school nearby, where friends will be close, than one miles away with such a journey.

Good luck: I hope a waiting list or appeal place for one of your preferences will come up.

I rang up the school admissions team at my LA (not Kent) to ask about how the free transport worked before we put in our secondary school application.

They basically said that they were only obligated to provide free transport to an offered school if we had our nearest schools as higher preferences on our application form.

So no chance of free transport anywhere if our nearest school wasn’t listed as a preference, regardless of whether we’d have actually qualified for a space there.

This information should be on the front page of their school application form.

The section about school transport was buried in the middle of the school applications guidance. I found it after I’d rang the school admissions team to talk about it.

So it was there online but not obvious or easy to find.

How does this comment help the OP??