Can we challenge school wait list allocations in our appeal?

[Whoseatingmyspinach]

We are appealing for our first choice school and are preparing our evidence.
We would like to show that the admissions authority have not allocated spaces from the wait list in accordance with their policy.
It's a very small community and everyone knows where everyone is on the wait list and the only criteria at the moment is distance from the school.
Two families are further away than we are and have been offered places. We know one family have lied on their application and we know one family moved house and didn't update the application.
We feel this is very unfair and after challenging the admissions team they state they have applied the criteria but yet these two families now have confirmed places while a number of us who live much closer remain in the wait list.

Does anybody have any advice for how we can use this in our appeal.

Surely you don’t know all the circumstances of the applications of the other families. They may have hit one of the other criteria that bumps them up the list or listed some exceptional circumstances that you are unaware of.

I have seen from someone who posts on this topic regularly that if the admissions criteria hasn’t been applied correctly then it is grounds for appeal so it’s worth a try.

You can state in your appeal the information that you have written here but you have said the only criteria that apply is distance. It would be very unusual for a school not to give priority to children that have previously been in care or have an EHCP (perhaps even mandatory I'm not sure). Unless you know these families well enough to know their children were not adopted (even as babies) and don't have an EHCP then you don't know how the criteria has been applied. That would be confidential information.

When I applied for my son's school I applied under "social reason" and included evidence. Other families that applied wouldn't know this. Children that lived nearer were turned down while my son got in.

In reality, I don't think this is going to help you.

One ground on which an appeal can be won is that the admission authority made a mistake that directly cost you a place.

Did this? Were you number one or two on the waiting list when this happened and these families got the place instead of you directly?

If not, then this is not helpful to you at all, I'm afraid; it may mean you should be a different place on the waiting list, but If you didn't mean you were explicitly denied a place it's not any sort of ground that an appeal panel can look at.

Honestly, even if you think it did directly cost you a place, it's going to be very difficult to persuade the panel that that has happened if you haven't managed to persuade the admissions authority with your evidence. The panel can't take in into consideration any gossip or conversations you've had with other people however honest they may be.

you need to concentrate on the other elements of the appeal - the elements that show that the prejudice to your child of not attending is greater than the prejudice to the School of taking another pupil.

(I sit on and chair appeals panels.)

If you 'know' that someone had provided false information, or failed to update the LA with information that would lead to them being ranked lower than they are, then tell the LA (and the admissions officer at the school, if it is its own admissions authority) about your suspicions. The school / LA hasnt made an error if it had ranked applicants according to the information that it has - an error in ranking would be being in possession of the correct information, but omitting to use it to rank the applicant correctly.

I did, I sent 2 emails the week the places were announced, talked to someone on the phone explaining I think they’ve used the wrong criteria and received a place on the following Monday.

Adding - tell them now re your suspicions, as they will then have time to investigate the circumstances before the appeals.

X-posted with @Blessedbethefruitloopss

Distance is the only decider if you are all in the same admissions category. If those admitted were in a higher category, they were admitted correctly.

If you are correct and they should not have been admitted, an appeal is not the way to sort this out. The appeal panel is not in a position to investigate whether people have given a false address. That is for the LA. You need to tell them of your suspicions. If you have done so and they haven't done anything, it is highly unlikely you will get anywhere with the appeal panel.

As @PatriciaHolm says, even if you could convince the appeal panel that these pupils were admitted incorrectly, it would only win your appeal if your child should have got a place. If there are still others ahead of you on the waiting list, this doesn't help you at all.

When you appeal you will receive info on the number of children given a place in each category. If there are places added from the waiting list it will say from what category and the last distance offered.

You can question this if you are nearer.
You can question what evidence was requested
You can question how the measurement was made.
They will not discuss individual children.
If a child was further away it would show up
If a child was in a higher category it would show up.

But you also need to show that you should have been offered that place.
Proving an error is not enough.

When I chair appeals, we are not allowed to know what position the appellant is on the waiting list.
You need to raise your issues with the admissions team before your appeal appointment.

Exactly what prh47bridge said.

In principle, if the admissions criteria have been applied incorrectly, and you can show your child would have got a place if applied correctly, that is a strong basis for appeal.

BUT the appeal panel cannot look into claims about other applicants having provided false information. Only the admissions authority can do that. So you need to pursue it with them.

The kind of admissions mistake that would work at appeal is more like “my child has a sibling at the school but has been treated as a non sibling in the admissions process”. Or “they used my old address instead of my new one even though I’d moved already at the relevant time and provided evidence”. As these don’t require any investigation of other applicants’ circumstances by the panel.

Also, the appeal panel can only grant or deny a place, they cannot bump you up the waiting list.

If the family that moved house did so after the application date (or possibly a slightly later cut off date) then that may well be fine and their old address applied correctly

When you say the other family lied, what do you mean? They put down a grandparent’s address or something? If you challenged the admissions team and they looked into it and were satisfied, then there’s nothing the panel can do about that.