School place withdrawn

[LittleHens]

@prh47bridge @schooladmission and other admissions experts I would be grateful for advice. My daughter received an offer at our 1st preference school on National
School Offer Day (3rd March) which we accepted later that day. Yesterday (20th March) we received an email from the LA to say that her place had been withdrawn as ‘unfortunately, the system did not pick up the out-of-borough address and calculated the school offer based on your old address we had on our system’.
Needless to say my 11 daughter is heartbroken.

We realise she would not have got a place based on the admissions criteria (we are now out-of-catchment) but for the LA to withdraw the offer after 17 days when it is their error (and not a fraudent application) is unacceptable in my mind. Can anyone offer any advice on the appeal process?
Thanks!

The view generally taken by the Schools Adjudicator is that it is ok for part of the catchment boundary to coincide with a local authority boundary, but a school cannot have the entire LA area as its catchment. After all, LA boundaries are generally there for some reason, rather than being arbitrary lines drawn on a map, even if the reason is ancient history. So, for example, a school in Edgware cannot have the entire borough of Barnet as its catchment, but it could have a catchment zone bounded in part by the Edgware Road, which marks the boundary between Barnet and Harrow.

That seems logical. A county or borough can still decide to divide itself into designated admission areas or catchments each with a designated school (and you’d expect those catchment areas to stop at the county boundary) without breaking the Greenwich ruling but you can’t discriminate solely on the basis of living in another authority.

OP, it’s not unusual for schools not to be in the middle of their catchment area. So you do end up with addresses that are nearer to their non catchment school than their catchment one or children further away from a school being admitted while children living closer to the school don’t get places because they are out of catchment. They can be weird shapes too. It’s fine as long as they haven’t drawn the catchment area to deliberately change the cohort I.e. have a weird shaped catchment that covers higher income households and cuts out lower income ones.

OP, on your question about the relevance of local authority boundaries, another aspect the local authority will need to consider is their duty to your child to offer a school place, and that duty lies with the LA where you live. In your case, the other factors would appear more important.

On cross border movement, it can be frustrating for LAs which have high performing schools, often, but not always, grammars, which are targeted by high numbers in other LAs, often living a considerable distance away, displacing a significant number of home LA children, e.g. disadvantaged bright but untutored children.