Successful appeal stories

[Supamum3]

I am in the camp of hoping at least one of the 4 appeals (!!) we are preparing for this month will
be successful.

Can anyone share stories of winning an appeal for your DC chosen school?

Hearing successful stories would be a great beacon of hope!

We won ours but it was mostly because the school decided to add a bulge class. Was an odd position where the school in the next town had had a bad ofsted so lots of people applied to the school in our town and because of a quirk of the “nearest school” criteria, they all got in ahead of us. We had to go through the whole appeals process which was scary but I spent so much time reading posts on here to help me prepare. Was such a relief when the school decided to admit extra students and dd got a place. I do give a wry smile when I see photos of the sports teams and so many of the kids went through the same ordeal as us. The school has since changed their admissions criteria so it hasn’t happened again

Thanks for this thread! I was just going to post the same one. Does anyone have any experience with an appeal based on a particular language available at the appeal school which is not available at the other one? We have a real and verifiable link to that language (it's my mother tongue).

Thanks for sharing, well done for putting the work in and getting decent results. I hope your dd settled in well.

Let’s hope an influx comes soon! There’s so much useful information on here

Speaking as someone who defends appeals, in the 10 years I've had visibility of, only 2 appeals were successful. They both won their appeal after the same first-stage group hearing, where it was concluded that the school had space for them. It was an unusual decision, which warranted a bit of scrutiny. It turned out that 2 members of the appeal panel had objected to the school's admissions policy during its consultation, so they had a conflict of interest. If that had been known beforehand, they wouldn't have been on the panel.

Why would your child benefit from learning your mother-tongue language at school? Do you mean because she'll get an easier ride at GCSE etc? Wouldn't she also benefit educationally from learning a different language?

If your child is learning your mother-tongue language at home, then most secondary schools will allow their students to take external exams in additional languages as private candidates.

Because of my second son's special needs (and a full time job), we don't really speak and have no time to learn my mother tongue at home. He speaks a bit, but learning it to GCSE level would be ideal to become conversational.

Just curious... never having submitted a response to a formal consultation, I assume that the names of those who do are not visible to the admission authority concerned? Since the school has the same opportunity to object to a panel member as the parents do when it is informed of the constitution of the panel, does it not make an attempt to see whether there is a reason for it to do so?

(Although, if you can't see their names at the time when they made the objection, how did you subsequently discover this?).

This experience is not typical. Nationally, around 21% of secondary school appeals and 16% of primary school appeals are successful.

"Just curious... never having submitted a response to a formal consultation, I assume that the names of those who do are not visible to the admission authority concerned?"

No, you assume wrongly. Admissions consultation responses aren't usually anonymous.

"Since the school has the same opportunity to object to a panel member as the parents do when it is informed of the constitution of the panel, does it not make an attempt to see whether there is a reason for it to do so?"

Yes, we do make an attempt and, since that experience, we've added a few more checks.

The appeals service do checks too, and there is obviously an obligation on panel members to self-declare. It was an unusual case, but the appeals service relies on volunteers, and unfortunately sometimes it attracts people with an agenda.

Anecdotes about previous winning appeals aren’t particularly helpful. All they tell you is that for that child, at that school, at that time, the panel concluded that the prejudice (detriment) to the child if not given a place outweighed the prejudice to the school in having to accommodate an extra pupil. The bottom line is that about a fifth of secondary appeals succeed.

Curriculum provision can (like almost anything else) be raised at appeal. The panel will reach a view, but (as often remarked on these threads) will be looking for evidence of what the child needs, above and beyond things that would be nice to have. Frankly, I think it may be hard to convince a panel that a child needs access to a language GCSE when the language isn’t spoken at home, even though a parent is a native speaker. But, as I said, every appeal is decided on its own facts.

I've been on panels for over 10 years, and I am very surprised at this school's low success rate for appellants. The national figure of around 20% success rate for secondary school appeals would fit with my own experience.

If appeal success rate was as low as @tripz suggests then there would be no point in anyone going through the process!

But this is why local context is important. Those 20% of successful appeals nationally aren't evenly spread across all schools or even all local authority areas. For example, there's a mention up-thread of a mistake happening, which resulted in a bulge class being added. Sometimes schools build new classrooms and suddenly have more space. Sometimes a school which has never had to defend appeals in the past gets caught out by change of circumstance (e.g. positive Ofsted, a negative Ofsted at a neighbouring school, a new housing estate, etc), gets an influx of appeals and puts up a weak defence through inexperience. Sometimes a school will take the view that they need as many extra students as they can get to plug a funding gap, so will not defend appeals as robustly as usual.

Our school has its local circumstances too. It is in an area of high population, where most schools are oversubscribed, but there is a school nearby that isn't as popular. It never fills on preferences, but a lot of families are allocated to it when none of their preferences are met. So most of the families who appeal to our school, are trying to avoid that one. No matter how they dress it up, it is virtually impossible for them to prove that our school offers anything that isn't provided at the one they're trying to avoid. We may do some things a bit better, but they usually only have anecdotal evidence for that and even if they have hard evidence it's never enough, because the other school provides for all the same needs as we do.

The schools others are appealing to probably have different circumstances to ours, so may be a softer target for appeals. My advice would be to try and understand your local context. Looking at appeal stats can help with that, but also "reading the room" of what is happening locally in your area.

For context, you can download national data from here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/admission-appeals-in-england.

If you download all data, filter for 2023, and Secondary phase, then sort by success rate, you'll see that it ranges from 60% in Hartlepool down to 1.4% in Brent, and 0% in Westminster.

So it's unwise to assume you have a "1 in 5 chance" no matter where you live.

Realistically, how much weight would the child being a service child hold weight at appeal? The school we would like to appeal to has specific provision that would genuinely support our daughters wellbeing as her father is due to deploy a lot.

You should start your own thread. This one is 2 years old.

Ok

It is, but I think your posts are worth repeating tripz! You’re absolutely right that the 20% figure is misleading as it is very very unevenly spread between schools and areas. Many schools will be very well placed to defend appeals if (as you describe) they are already full to bursting and offer no specialist provision that can’t be found at other less full local schools.