Secondary school place allocation - 1 March

[LilySLE]

How is everyone feeling about the fact that we find out tomorrow which secondary school our Year 6 children will be going to?

I am wondering whether to stay up till midnight to wait for the email 🙈

@Nicky198 you would have been considered for each of your choices but presumably failed to qualify high enough to get a place at any of them, hence the one further away. Ask LA which category your dc was placed in for preferred ones, the distance calculation used and furthest offered. You may find your neighbour was the furthest and you might be high on wl, they may have qualified in a higher priority criteria, or maybe a mistake was made for your dc. It does not matter you placed it third if you had qualified for a place within the PAN.

@Nicky198 our post has just arrived and I have a letter from our LA which sets out our choices and how we fared in each category. It tells us which admission criteria we were considered under, how the distance from the school was measured and what it was measured to be. Hopefully your LA will do something similar as this should provide a lot of the answers you are seeking as to how and why you were allocated the place you were

@Nicky198
non of our options were taken into consideration
it wasn’t a human decision as such it was just a simple case of you not meeting a high enough criteria in terms of the admissions criteria for each of the preferred schools. These could all be different, assume you checked them all out before you put them down?
authorities don’t “choose” a school for individual children it’s essentially a computer programme that has to take into account all the varying admissions criteria for the different schools. It’s extremely complicated but in the vast majority of cases the rules are followed and it’s all done fairly (even if sadly some kids end up in very tricky situations).
Very rarely, mistakes are made. It happened with another mnetter yesterday and is now resolved. If you don’t get a letter explaining you can call your LA Monday and they should be able to explain why you didn’t get places and also your chances of getting into the school your neighbour got into. As others have said, chances of movement on WLs is very high.

Make sure you are on waiting lists (and consider appealing if you can identify other reasons to do so) and hopefully you’ll have a closer school by then.

In the meantime, get practicing with the bus - do bus journeys together, talk through how it works, what you’d do if you missed your stop or it didn’t turn up, get him to take the lead with you there, get him to catch it alone and follow on/meet him at the destination. There’s months to build it up. Even if he gets a closer school, it’s not a bad idea to start building more of those independent skills.

Would he be able to bus to the childminder?

Thank you - we are also in London. Just hoping we can maybe have some luck on the waitlist but I will also appeal due to other personal circumstances and see if we have any luck - fingers crossed 🤞

@localnotail he'll be expected to develop those skills in the next 6 months along with millions of others. Unless he has SEN. I'm an august born and did that type of journey 35 odd years ago on a public bus and walk. With no phone.
I may sound harsh but that's reality.
High school kids are expected to get themselves to school and back & stay home for a couple of hours alone if needed.

Thank you. Of course we are going to do practice, but it would have been better if it was a school we felt was worth all this hassle. As it is, its just a basic school but miles away.

it is harsh. all kids are different, and even if there is no SEN there could be other reasons why a child is anxious or insecure on their own.

I'm only saying the response you are likely to get from admissions or an appeal panel. Unless you have medical etc evidence to back it up.
They will expect them to do a journey on public transport.

Agree re public transport. Might you know anyone through school or cubs or
something who goes to that secondary, who could buddy up on the journey?

What those two families I know had in common is that they selected all 6 school choices from a neighbouring borough. They got zero offers from here but they got unexpected school from their own borough.

Yeah it’s odd - ours were all in our borough and within catchment but they placed us to an unsubscribed school out of our catchment -my instincts tell me they have made an error

Definitely check what distance they have you from all the schools and the last distance @Nicky198

Saying that, it was extremely common for kids in the neighbourhood I grew up in not to be able to get into the 7 or 8 closest schools.. they went to one a good few miles away instead. They built an extra school a few years ago, but it took ages to get the planning permission as there were so many objections.

It can be literally that that was where the line was drawn.

One year I knew someone whose neighbour one side got into school A, other side got into school B and the person almost exactly opposite got into school C.
They had schools A, B and C on their preferences, and got none of them.
The good news was they were 1st on the waiting list for two of the schools and second for the other and they were offered all three before June at various points and ended up going to their top preference.

@Nicky198 when the criteria is distance from school, someone has to be the last house. I’m in London and when I did secondary school applications we had the exact same thing. On the edge of the furthest distance offered from a few secondaries so a neighbour would get in and the one next door or a few doors down wouldn’t. No mistakes made, just if there’s 250 places the last place gets offered eventually.

It’s been particularly challenging recently as schools that used to be unpopular so gave to almost everyone are suddenly becoming popular and now people aren’t getting places. You wouldn’t realise it if you looked at past offers so some people have been caught unawares.

When admissions say it doesn‘t matter what positions you list the schools because you are considered equally whether you put the school 1st or 5th, how does this work in practice with schools that use a lottery system?

I would assume that the lottery sorts all applicants for a school A from 1-1000 (or whatever) by random number, then that list is put into the system. If a child at 47 on the lottery school list lives close to their first choice school B and hence gets a place there, then the lottery list shifts up one because that child is off to school B .

It’s exactly the same as other ways of sorting the lists - the applicant ranking happens first and then a child high enough on more than one list only gets their first choice and comes off other lists, and everyone moves up one

🙀 def appeal

Instead of ranking applicants in the tie-break category by distance, they rank them by lottery result.

That list is returned to the LA, who also get lists from by-distance schools (and who co-ordinate with other boroughs)

Then something like a giant game of CandyCrush happens. Each school has X places. The computer looks at who in the school ranking 1-X has listed it as first preference. They go in the offer pile, and their lower preferences are deleted from other schools lists. And those schools lists all shuffle up a bit. Done for every school, until there is no more movement. Then repeat with 2nd preference, 3rd etc. They "close" each school as X is reached.

Thank you for your response Clearinguptheclutter. I sent them an email just to make sure that I don't need to 'do' anything.

@Nicky198 Did you manage to get hold of the breakdown of how you fared, and how places were allocated, in relation to the schools you listed on your application? Are you any further forward?

Nope nothing - i called today and didn’t get any answers, they asked me to put my concerns in writing and wait for a response and also to wait till April to find out who’s been accepted and who has’nt and what the waitlists look like - it’s been frustrating to say the least - had to go to the main switchboard to get through the cracks to talk to admission's and they had a permanent voicemail on 😵‍💫

When do waiting lists tend to move? Is it the end of April or updated daily?

I wonder if it may be local authority specific. I tried to get an answer from my LA but what came back was quite opaque. I know that they will make a second round of offers on 8 May. But I’m unclear whether it’s possible to receive an updated offer before that date.

How the "second round" is managed does differ by LA - their website might say, or you could email. Some do sit on everything until a next date, where late applications are considered as well as waiting lists/rejections etc, some do it more day by day.