Can a school treat pupils differently based on which preference they ranked a school?

[EduCated]

Facebook put a post from a random school not local to me in my feed (as it does) which I’m intrigued by.

This school seems to be offering transport (unclear if it’s free or a paid service) to Year 7 pupils who put the school as their first choice.

It feels dubious to be incentivising first choices with something so tangible, but then to actually go on and provide a different service based on whether or not the school was first choice. Is that actually allowed?

Yes you got that school because a place was available. Do you actually think your DC leapfrogged a load of other children who.lived nearer, put that school first but then listed nearer schools as their 2nd and 3rd prefs? That would never stand up would it?

What happened was that luckily for you, you were within the last offered distance of the school you put first preference. All good. Nothing at all to do with the other schools you listed. I promise.

Okay. So the parents in the facebook groups who lived on the doorstep of the school but didnt get a place and were unsuccessful on appeal are just lying.

In the primary school, there were some angry parents that I and others got places despite living 2 miles away while local children who had a nursery place were not given a spot for reception.

My way has worked for me and people I know. I will stick to it for sure.

It's true where I live. The only people who are ever successful on appeal were allocated schools they never applied to

You are wrong.

Anecdote is not data.

I am not wrong. A lot of people on this thread thought schools weren't privy to preferences. They were shown to be wrong.

No one's assuming that. They are taking it from admissions policies. The advice you are giving could be actively damaging - I knew several people at the school gate who only put down one option thinking "they'll have to give us it". Their children got allocated a school about 8 miles away which had been in special measures for years and sat plum last in the county's league tables. There was absolute disbelief that the LA could be so "unfair" but I couldn't believe how many of them hadn't bothered to read the admissions policy and thought they were being clever. Several of them ended up forking out for private school.

Thankfully that's unlikely to happen these days as the birth rate is down and schools are much less heavily oversubscribed. Children get into their first preference where there is space for them, irrespective of what you put lower down your list.

You are wrong about how preferences work and how appeals work.

HTH.

People can say anything on FB tho.

If you are in England and this happened in the last 10 or so years, then one of the following will be the case:
The ppl didn't list the school they wanted
They listed it, but put another school higher (maybe bc of poor advuce) and were offered that
Their application was late or in some other way incorrectly submitted

Ooh, I have another one - because PP said "while local children who had a nursery place were not given a spot for reception."

The parents thought they didn't have to do an application as DCs were attending the school nursery and assumed that would transfer automatically.

Correlation does not equal causation.

Well this thread, unless you think it is made up, shows otherwise, doesn't it?

No it's pretty widely known and advertised that it doesnt work that way. They applied and were not given a place.

Or they just didnt get the school because other people like us got it instead.

Don't seem to be so far.

If the criteria were incorrectly applied, then they should have won on appeal (indeed, they should have won without need for an appeal)

But I refer you to clary's other point - people on FB don't always give a true, fair and accurate picture of events...

Here you got, sweetie - 1.9c is the chapter and verse that you need. HTH!

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-admissions-code--2

1.9 It is for admission authorities to formulate their admission arrangements, but they must not: a) place any conditions on the consideration of any application other than those in the oversubscription criteria published in their admission arrangements; b) take into account any previous schools attended, unless it is a named feeder school; c) give extra priority to children whose parents rank preferred schools in a particular order, including ‘first preference first’ arrangements;

Not really no, it's just a FB post.

It can say lots of things. The reality can be somewhat different as I have found it to be. Don't apply to schools you won't attend. It's as simple as that.

It wasnt incorrectly applied, other people were just of higher priority than they were.

Other people may have been of higher priority (looked after children, siblings, feeder schools, music aptitude, children of staff etc) but it was not because of where they put the school as a preference on the application form

By definition, if it was because of where they put the school in the preference order, then the criteria were not correctly applied.

Anyway. For those that grasp admissions. Do we think that is was a miscommunication with the person writing the FB? Surely the school must know that they don’t get to see the individual preferences? Do the primary schools see choices?! Clutching at straws.

Is it definitely the school’s official FB page and not an impostor?

Definitely. Not a school I’m familiar with at all, but very solidly looks like the school’s page (lots of recent sports updates etc.).

Should say, an English state secondary.

I’ve been through the appeals process and I did think the fact that we had been offered our second choice counted against us.

However I think a blatant attempt to try to game the system by making your other choices schools that you have no realistic chance of getting into would gain you no sympathy whatsoever with a panel and is an incredibly stupid idea. Amazes me people still believe that you can cheat the process like this.

Your local admissions team would probably be interested in addressing this with the school concerned.