Secondary school appeals

[wellingtondays]

Has anyone won a secondary school appeal hearing . Just wondering if there are many success stories

I sit on appeal panels and the success rate is very low. But to be honest, this is because most appellants’ arguments are “the school we’ve been given has problems/bad results”; “the school run to the allocated school doesn’t work for us” or “all his friends are going to this school”. None of which count unfortunately. It’s rare to see a case which gives a valid need for that particular school.

So while the low success rate might seem off putting, actually if you do have a good case, you shouldn’t be discouraged - as the rate reflects that most appeals don’t have good grounds.

Around 20% of secondary school appeals are successful. As the previous poster says, many parents don't understand the process and present arguments that are bound to fail. If you take the trouble to understand the kind of case you need to make, you are already doing better than most appellants.

@wellingtondays as responses on your various threads, you have already received a lot of the information/ advice contained in this document, but you miight find it useful:
www.gov.uk/government/publications/admission-appeals-for-school-places/advice-for-parents-and-guardians-on-school-admission-appeals

How do you know already that you need to appeal, is it an in-year transfer? As year 6 don’t find out their secondary choices for September, until march?

The school is full of, all of my local secondary schools are

To have a chance of being successful at appeals, you need to show how the appeal school is the only school for your child. If you can back this up with evidence even better. Stating things like logistics, child care, friends attending the school, the allocated school is bad etc are not strong enough reasons. You need to have a strong case and present this at appeal.

No, you do not have to show that the appeal school is the only school for your child. That is a myth. You simply have to show that your child will be disadvantaged if they go to the allocated school rather than the appeal school. If, for example, your child wants to study Spanish and the appeal school offers this but the allocated school does not, that is a point in your favour even if every other local school offers Spanish.

Fair point but using your example the Panel may conclude that the child could then go to another local school who also offered Spanish that not solely the appeal school?

Going off on a bit of a tangent but I’m really interested in this point @prh47bridge .

The appeal panels I have sat on, the other panellists always seem to apply the test of “is this the only school in the area that can give the child X” rather than just “is this school better than the offered school for X”. I always think the “only school” test is harsh - is the appellant really supposed to have investigated every school in the borough to check whether they offer X? I prefer your view.

Is there any law that points one way or the other? We have a panellist training session coming up and I’d like to raise this there.

Also for @VanillaDaydream

The current appeals code states that, in considering the case, the panel must consider what the school can offer that the allocated or other schools cannot. This does imply that other schools can be considered. However, taking my example, let us imagine that there are three schools in the area offering Spanish - A, B and C. If we take the "only school" approach, an appeal for school A will fail, because schools B and C teach Spanish, an appeal for school B will fail because schools A and C teach Spanish, and an appeal for school C will fail because schools A and B teach Spanish. So our child, who really needs a school that teaches Spanish, remains disadvantaged.

My argument would be that the appeal panel for school A does not know if places are available at schools B and C, nor do they know the outcome of any appeals for those schools or the strength of the case to refuse admission to those schools. It may be, for example, that schools B and C are so overcrowded that no appeal can possibly win, so if the appeal for school A is rejected on the grounds that schools B and C teach Spanish our child is definitely going to remain disadvantaged.

Given the above, my view is that, whilst there may be some circumstances in which it is appropriate to consider other schools, in general the only schools in play should be the appeal school and the allocated school. I think there was an LGO decision to this effect once, but sadly I don't have the reference and I can't find it on their website.

Thank you so much. Yes, the “only school” test does lead to exactly the catch-22 situation you describe. I’ll raise it at the training and see what they say.

@minipie The 'only school' test is stated in many schools' Exceptional Circumstances criteria. In my area it's not used by appeals panels except in the context of verifying whether Exceptional Circumstances were properly considered according to school policy.

Nevertheless, if a parent appeals to school A on the grounds that it teaches Spanish, and school B also teaches Spanish but clearly has places available, I would expect it to weaken the appellant's argument unless they had a good reason why School B is unsuitable.

It's easy to check if other schools have places - the information is usually on our LA website. I wouldn't necessarily expect the panel to check that but, as a school's representative for appeals, I will often include that information in my case.

Hi; I am following this thread with interest, and just wondered please whether there was any further clarification on this point at the training? Many thanks.

Training hasn’t happened yet - will feed back if this gets answered.

However, if you are appealing, I will say that all the panels I have sat on seem to apply the “only school” version. So prepare for that.

There is no national standard for training, so the answer may well be different depending on who supplies the training.

This is good to know. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

If I recall correctly, in one of our recent trainings, we were told that the only two schools relevant to the appeal were the preferred school and the allocated school; we shouldn’t therefore get sidetracked into considering or discussing whether a third school might be better or more suitable.

I guess the key question is why your child would be more disadvantaged by not going to that school than another child might be. If 150 kids apply for 50 places, then 100 kids won't get in. Some of those may actually be happy going to another school, but even if 50 kids appealed, they won't all get in, so why should your child get in more than another child?

No, the question is, Is the prejudice to this child in not attending this school greater than the prejudice that will be suffered by the school through having to admit any other pupil above the number currently resourced for. Which includes.g all the at least 'PAN-worth' of pupils in that year group already having their teacher time, physical space etc shared out more thinly. The only time appellants are ranked against each other is if there are more of them whose appeals, on their individual merits, the panel would uphold, than the panel can possibly direct the school to take. At that point, the panel must decide how many should be upheld, and uphold that number with the strongest cases.

I think it’s do hard to win these days as they have heard it all and have responses for everything. If you really want to win an appeal I think the only way to go is using one of those companies that do it for you and build your case. ( if you can afford that, we couldn’t)

There is no evidence that it is getting harder to win appeals. And I would strongly recommend against paying one of the companies that you suggest. It may be that there are some good ones out there, but I haven't come across them. I have, however, come across far too may cases where parents have been given very poor advice by such companies. This includes some cases where parents lost cases they should have won because they followed the advice they had paid for.

Duplicate post - sorry!

We won an appeal two years ago. Happy to PM if still relevant as I realise you posted this before results were out.

I agree with this. @prh47bridge your advice on this forum was amazing two years ago when we went through this (everyone else - listen to her please, she knows what she is talking about)! The clue is to really educate yourself about the appeal. I don't think hiring one of those companies would have improved our case. We appealed based on 1) provision in a specific subject that appeal school was offering (with tons of evidence), 2) special educational needs and access to occupational therapy close to appeal school (again with tons of evidence). In our hearing, we were asked many questions about both these reasons.
We also constructed - but realise we were on slightly slippy grounds there - a case around the fact that his brother has more severe educational needs, and thus requires lots of our time (hospital visits, therapy), making it very difficult to manage both childrens' needs. We said that our son being in a school near his OT made it possible to manage both childrens' educational needs. We are not sure to what extent that last argument was taken into account, but we were asked questions about the number of appointments we need to attend with our younger child. So perhaps it supported our overall case well.
We were also lucky I think that this was our 2nd appeal. The first was rejected, but the rejection letter gave us some clues about why, and we were able to gather further evidence before the 2nd appeal hearing and slightly change some minor things in our spoken case before the 2nd appeal hearing.

We are in the position now that we are looking to appeal our school choice, the 3 main reasons being the school the school we want has drama on the curriculum from Year 7 (a big part of my daughters identity and her way to express herself, particularly as she finds typical academic subjects tricky), thy also offer Spanish whereby the school offered only offered French and German, as a family we have been learning Spanish.
Finally, its co-ed and the school offered is single sex. Not sure if these are strong enough arguments, but each one will allow my daughter to thrive and are things not offered at the allocated school