Secondary appeal - not offered place from feeder school

[JimJamJim]

Trying to work out if we have the basis for an appeal.

Child attends a primary on the same site as secondary.
Primary school has been designated as a feeder school for the secondary - in practice this means children from the primary are a priority group within the oversubscription criteria (after SEN and siblings).

The published rationale for having feeder school status is talks about things like facilitating curriculum alignment between the schools and primary school children "knowing they can join [secondary] in Y7". At various points we have received written communication from the primary saying things like children will have an "automatic" place at the secondary.

Easing the adjustment between primary and secondary was a key reason we chose the primary, child has always assumed they would go there.

We haven't been offered a place! Currently no reason to believe the admissions criteria haven't been applied correctly (though we are looking into it).

There's various other secondary reasons that the school particularly suits the child in terms of ethos, curriculum etc. But would the simple fact of it being a feeder we were encouraged to assume was a guarantee, and both us and the school preparing the child for that transition, be a case we could argue?

I'm not expert but with such a contorted system breaking applicants into such small pots, surely this must be not an unknown problem. If 20% of your school's children are in top band from feeder school and only 10% of the places go to children from that band, it should be fairly common for not all of them to get a place, even without an unusually high quota of siblings. I guess maybe not if the secondary is much bigger. But to me it sounds like a "designed in" problem. The bands are there to skew the intake and your child is unfortunately one of the casualties. It would have been easy enough to design a system where the feeder school children are admitted before the banding is applied, and if it was more important to give those children that "through" experience than to get the distribution right, they would have done so. But that's not what happened. Feeder school children were knowingly included in the banding so it's unlikely anyone is going to accept now that that is unfair.

However as I say, that's only my completely non-expert opinion and you have nothing to lose by trying.

At our school, with different admissions rules but the same problem of children not getting in from feeder school, absolutely no one won on appeal. Most of those affected were younger siblings too, and it was particularly tough that they all ended up at a different school from their brothers and sisters. But they settled ok , made friends, and they all ended up in the same sixth form eventually.

This is so strange. The primary feeder school is actually disadvantaging its children by teaching them well and having higher than average attainment. It sounds like people can play the system by telling their children to only answer half the paper which is ridiculous.

You might just be able to argue that the banding system is irrational and discriminatory in that it should be a fair representation of the intake rather than based on national figures.

Bizarrely, you should probably check the marking if you didn't expect your child to be in the top group. You could become the unique parent who actually complains that her child has been overmarked and he really should be in a lower group.

You also need to consider whether you can make an argument that your child will suffer prejudice which outweighs any potential prejudice yo the school from taking an extra pupil. Having been led to think a place was a done deal could form part of that argument,

We got our second choice but we aren’t at all happy - it was the safely net to have undersubscribed school for what seemed like a very very unlikely outcome of not getting in to the school on the same site (have to stop calling it “our school”)

Is your DD the only one affected?

@AuntAgathaGregson you are giving misleading advice. An appeal is not the right place to object to an admissions policy - that needs to be done via the Schools Adjudicator.

An appeal panel will check to see if a policy aligns with the admissions code, and that it has been correctly applied, but they will not judge whether it is "fair". Only the adjudicator can do that.

@JimJamJim this link will explain about making an objection: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-admissions-arrangements. You will have to object to the 2026 policy, but if the policy is deemed to be unfair for 2026 it is irrefutable evidence that it must also be unfair for 2025.

One of the reasons banding is used is to try to counter this common scenario:

An area has a few strong schools, some middling ones and some that are viewed as undesireable. Families who can afford it choose to move near the higher-performing schools, and these families are simply statistically more likley to have higher-attaining children for multiple reasons. Those schools become even more desireable because they test well and have fewer behavior issues. Property values around them rise and students come from an continually shrinking radius. Within the wider area, higher-attaining students end up increasingly concentrated, while already struggling schools end up with a disproportionate number of students who come from lower-income families and are statistically more likely to be falling behind in school. The latter schools become increasingly undesireable and families who can afford to move away until these become "schools of last resort." Banding is a very blunt, very imperfect tool that absolutely has its downsides, but it's trying to somewhat counter that and ensure that strong schools are still pulling a comprehensive student profile that isn't quite as firmly linked to which street a child's parents can afford to live on within a borough or LA. And between schools it's an attempt to even out their intakes somewhat to avoid compounding issues of unequally performing schools.

@shintoland I don't think it's deliberately designed in - or at least, I don't think they intended for to it leading to a scenario where feeder school kids didn't get a place at the secondary. I just don't think they foresaw this happening - I don't think they would have told us we had "guaranteed" places unless they believed they were confident that was what the admissions policy would deliver in practice.

I can understand that logic. I think my observations would be that:

Nine bands is trying to too finely manage the issue, because small bands compound the risk of "unfair" outcomes.

Using the national average for banding for a school in a low-deprivation area of London is skewing the outcome too much. Avoiding the issue of buying a school place via a house in the right postcode is a good aspiration but perhaps basing it on the borough or London average would be more balanced?

And most of all - the idea of combining a feeder primary with a banding system is asking for perverse outcomes because they naturally pull in opposite directions.

That s not exactly true. They do use a banding test but rank all the students taking it and then divide them equally into 4 bands (see pic from the admission policy). St Marylebone CE and Grey Coat in Westminster do exactly the same. It ranks the students vs the cohort and not vs the national average. @JimJamJim this banding looks really unfair and I haven’t seen any other school do it. Can you send the exact wording in their admission policy?

@JimJamJim I wondered if you were in London. Banding is incredibly common there.

I absolutely understand why you're unhappy about how this worked out for your own child, particularly given the messaging you received from the school about how likely she was to get a place. It does sound like they need to make some changes to how they describe the feeder relationship.

Banding is an attempt to create an even profile within each school and using it to "pull in" some lower-attaining students to strong schools who weren't able to gain a place by pure proximity is part of the goal. Using a more local bell average that matches their existing population doesn't help with that. I think it's also worth pointing out that high-attaining students in London already have additional options compared to lower-attaining students and the "extra" places you're seeing are outweighed by those places in grammars and partially-selective schools. I understand the frustration in this moment when your daughter has landed in one of the tiny minority of situations where being high-attaining can be seen as a disadvantage in our school system, but our society and economic system still dramatically advantages children like your DD (and my own DC) overall. The feeder system is designed to create cohesive curriculums and somewhat consolidate the flow of students from primaries to secondaries, but the banding is still there to level intakes between schools at the secondary level. And being at the feeder hasn't actually disadvantaged your daughter in any way, it just seems to have created faulty expectations.

Regardless, the appeals process won't debate the "fairness" of the admissions policy when it comes to things like selecting a bell curve to use or how feeder relationships are used in the oversubscription criteria; that's the domain of the Schools Adjudicator. Honestly my best advice would be to stay on the waitlist for the preferred school, big up the allocated one for now, and give some very blunt feedback to the primary about feeling like you were blindsided by this turn of events based on what you've been told.

Hopefully some of the knowledgeable mn posters will see this and offer advice.

@prh47bridge is the expert.

@GravyBoatWars you make the general argument for banding very well and I do understand it. And as I've been saying to DH that in many ways we should count ourselves lucky that this is the first time in our lives we've really found ourselves screwed over by "the system" because for many people (esp if your poor, disabled, an immigrant etc etc) the system is screwing you over daily.

Though I would add that this isn't wholly a "pushy middle class family wants their bright kid to get into the best school" thing, there's slightly more to the school's suitability for my DD than that (but none of it an open and shut case).

In terms of where we stand - absolutely hear what you and others have said that the fairness or otherwise of the admissions criteria is neither here nor there when it comes to an appeal.

In my view though I do think there's a case that DD has been disadvantaged by the outcome, as it's not simply a case of school A vs school B, it's a school they have an existing relationship with by virtue of it being co-located and partnered with the primary, vs school B. To use an (obviously ludicrously OTT, sorry) analogy, am I objectively a better mum for DD than another mum would be? Maybe maybe not but the fact I am their mum counts for something. This is their school. Maybe that's small beer and not really of much interest to an appeals panel in the same way that going to the same school as friends doesn't carry weight. But given this is basically how the schools themselves justify having a feeder school I do think it should be considered.

The one thing that schools which use fair banding as part of their admissions procedure must not do is use score in the test to rank applicants. It's not an 'entrance test' as such; the actual score has no function other than to indicate which band an applicant should be ranked within - the actual ranking must then be according to 'normal' non-selective school lines (highest preferences given to LAC / PLAC, then whatever criteria compliant with the Admissions Code that the school decides, e.g. siblings / children of staff etc).

As others have said, although nationwide it isn't an overly common practice, it is quite common in London.

If you are interested, have a look at the section on 'Fair Banding' within the Admissions Code.

Correct, I wasn’t getting that specific with the random example I pulled off the top of my head beyond using banding. If you need the name of a school that uses the national approach and 9 bands… Harris Academy Greenwich.

Here is the section of the school admissions code of 2021 that discusses the use of banding as an over subscription criteria. Schools may use banding that’s based only on their applicants, on the local area, or on a national scale.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/60ebfeb08fa8f50c76838685/School_admissions_code_2021.pdf#page9

@JimJamJim is the banding quite a recent addition? Because otherwise the primary should have known better then using words like guarantee

My child missed their first choice. The criteria differed between schools. We got our catchment school though we live virtually the same distance to both schools.

The first choice school prioritised feeder schools (more than one primary) over any distance. My friend must have been more switched on than me because she chose a primary feeder school way back when they started aged 5. Both her kids will go there. She lives miles away.

The banding system sounds fair but what isn’t fair is that if a band is taken up by siblings then you miss out. I think if you are a school which practises banding then you can’t give siblings priority. It has to be a fair, objective, allocation. Sibling priority works better when it is simply distance afterwards.

So if your child had deliberately flunked the test would they have got in? That’s one of the weirdest policies I’ve ever seen!

Exactly. Siblings are prioritised and I would argue that they have an advantage as the parents know how the test works ahead of time in a way that the new applicants wouldn’t. I know it isn’t an entrance test per se but I’d argue that many of the children will be prepped more than the others and more likely to score higher. Knowing that my higher attaining child isn’t going to get a place due to to this and the lesser number of places in the higher bands, I’d be incentivised to tell my child to do the paper and rub out about about 20% of their answers

If you go for appeal you have to show that if your child doesn't get a place at the preferred school they will suffer more than the school will by admitting an extra pupil.
Thats the criteria, you'll need as much evidence as you can get.

That’s what I’m thinking. And you can now tell all the mums with younger kids to do that…
It seems like having siblings taking up the band is totally unfair if they only have the 10 spaces! Your child never stood a chance.
Id ask to speak to the primary school about it as they basically told you your child had a place.

Banding can still be used to gerrymander intake though it seems as if this school is in fact not doing this.

A school local to me bases the four bands on the ability range of the pupils taking the test - given that it's in an area where many kids go private, loads of kids who taking 11+ for grammars and independents take it and so it skews very very high. In addition you have to register for the test way before the admissions deadline and it takes place on a random saturday in September (in other words, it takes a certain amount of engagement to even sit the test). Kids I knew who got near full marks in SATs ended up in the second band. I just looked up the prior attainment for this year's GSCE students and the number of high ability students was 50% higher than middle ability and 30x bigger than the lower ability ones.

How does it help if everyone does this? It just means band 5 will be the overcrowded band instead of band 1, say.