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?

That Facebook post reads really strangely, not at all like a school has written it.

I also know someone who did what you did, ended up being in a school an hour away from his house and with no one else that he knew. His parents were just naive and didn’t realise they could/should put back up choices rather than trying to play the game though.

Is your child the one who lives the furthest away from the school out of all of those in the class?

The schools don’t know how you ranked them so I can’t see how they can say this.

Sorry OP, it's an interesting question and I have no idea. It looks very much against the spirit of things but it's a perk not a place. No harm in forwarding it to LA schools team and letting them judge.

It's quite creative as a marketing strategy. I almost admire them for it. I'd be really interested to know what your conclusion is.

Have emailed the LA out of sheer damn nosiness.

I think the post is badly written but it might be being misinterpreted. Could it be about an open day or transition day? I ask because it talks about taking them from and back to their primary school. If it was for a year 7 place why on earth would school transport collect from primary schools? Plus it says the same applies to those on grammar school pathway. If this is a state comprehensive, why would they be arranging transport for children going to grammar school?

I think there is a taster day and they are only inviting those who’ve put the school as first choice. Which is a bit cheek as they’re not supposed to know who put it first, but as admissions are handled at LA level it doesn’t really matter if the school know.

No… ignore me. Just seen it says every evening. Weird.

Where were they shown to be wrong? You are just straight up incorrect about this. The entire system is based on the fact that schools don't know the parents' preferences. Once the applications are in, computers do an enormous job of data crunching. Everybody who applied for School A is ranked against that school's admissions criteria. Same for Schools B, C, D and so on.

Once all the applications are ranked the computer goes through the list looking at the parental preferences. Say Parent X put School A as top preference, School A can take 240 children into year 7 and Parent X happens to come in the top 240, that's that - Parent X will be offered a place at School A.

But if Parent X also came high on the list for School B and had put that as top preference and School A second or lower, the place offered would be at School B. Parent X would be removed from the School A list (and all the other schools they'd applied for) and others would be bumped up a place.

The computer goes on and on repeating this process until all the places requested have been considered, and the vast majority of parents should have got a place at one of the schools they listed. At this point if there are any parents left who don't have a place they get allocated to any school which still has unfilled places.

That's how it worked when we went through this a little over 20 years ago. I assume it's still how it works now.

I pasted the opening words into Google and the school's Facebook page came up as the first result. Looks legit to me. What are MAC pupils?

Edit: I see now, it's multi-academy company.

I wonder if they require an additional form when applying to that school? Lots of schools, usually faith ones or ones with criteria that can’t be determined from the child’s home address alone. It won’t be an LA school, that’s for sure.

They may ask this on such a form. I can’t see the LA agreeing to pass on that info. How they prove you actually put them as first choice is another matter.

Maybe the school itself doesn't understand the process and thinks the people who list it first will be given places first.

(I only listed one Secondary school... but we live 100m away from the front gate so presumed it was a pretty safe option, especially as they usually take every child who lives in the (defined) catchment are which goes out 7 miles in some directions)

The school wouldn't know this.

The form is on their website. It doesn’t ask this