Secondary appeal - when to ask a specific question

[Serazias]

I was wondering if anyone had any advice about when I should raise this at appeal.

The school we have appealed for is the most popular in the borough, there are only 5 secondaries in total - 1 of which is a Catholic school which never admits non-catholics. Therefore we really only have 4 schools.

The school has as part of its case that they have high SEN numbers and only 12 staff, but actually they have the lowest percentage of SEN in the borough and the highest availability of TA support. The school we have been offered has twice the rate of SEN (numbers as per the government website) and is struggling to fill TA roles so has far lower availability.

We would therefore like to challenge the school's case as actually by not admitting our child they are forcing them to attend in an even worse SEN staffing situation. This would also be true of anyone else who is appealing with an allocated school in the borough. There are four full days of appeals being heard.

Whilst our child has SEN this is not part of our appeal as we understand the majority of needs can be met in any vaguely competent school. However, given this is a large part of our appeal school's grounds for not accepting more students it feels slightly disingenuous for them to state it would be harmful for them to admit more SEN whilst condemning these children to a situation where the other schools are operating at double the SEN rate (one school is almost triple!).

So, my question is do we query it, and if so do we raise this in part 1 or part 2?

TIA and sorry for the lengthy post!

Questions on the Schools case have to be raised at Stage 1 of the appeal.

Stage 2 focuses on the parents case and l believe you can't ask questions about the school case at Stage 2.

@Serazias you should submit your evidence before the appeal if you want the panel to look at it.

Is the offered school undersubscribed? If so, that may be why they're struggling, and you'd be contributing to that undersubscription by avoiding it.

@Itmakesnosense thank you. I thought this was the case, but the paperwork says "general questions" and mine is specific in comparing it to another offered school which was why I was hesitant.

@crabapl all the evidence is submitted. We literally just received back the school's case and I am questioning one of their reasons for claiming they cannot admit more students. And no, our offered school is full too and with a waiting list of its own, just there are not enough people wanting to TA it seems (and the pay is rubbish whilst we live in an expensive to live location).

Does the government data tell you how many of the SEND students have EHCP's. That info may be in the school's SEND report on their website. It's significant because it is often EHCP money that pays for TAs. More TA's may mean a greater proportion of their SEN students have an EHCP, and therefore more severe need.

Of course, I haven’t seen the school’s case, but I doubt they’re saying they can’t admit more children with SEN because they already have so many. In my experience, schools often argue they can’t admit any children above PAN, because the number of children with additional needs puts additional pressure on resources and all children will be disadvantaged if those pressures are increased.

Thank you for all the advice on here. It turned out that I didn't need to mention anything in the end, as the appeals panel had looked into all the schools and raised exactly the same point that actually they were lower on SEN than the rest of the borough. There were almost 30 appeals and apparently the point the school were trying to make was that they could not take a whole additional class.