Primary school admissions - MNHQ needs your thoughts!

[RowanMumsnet]

Hello

We've been asked (in advance of primary school places allocation announcements in England, Wales and NI next week) for MNers' thoughts on the current systems for allocating primary places - so as ever we thought we'd come to you for your insights.

What do you think about how your LA allocates places? Have you found the process stressful? Do you think the difficulty/stress varies widely across the nation - and if so, which locations are particularly difficult and which are relatively stress-free? If you're in Scotland, where the system is different, do you think it works well (or not?) Would you support a change to the allocation system - and if so, how would you like to see it changed?

Any thoughts welcome. Best of luck to anyone waiting to hear about their child's place.

This thread has spiralled well away from the original question of - What do you think about how your LA allocates places?
Was this not about over subscription, sibling rules, faith criteria etc

I am not convinced by the summerborn campaign but am convinced that reception should be what was always meant to be. I totally agree with Tiggy (as always) and others like Ionone. As I said previously I know vast numbers of parents, with reception age DC of all sorts of ability and ages, but no one has said their 4 year olds are struggling with reception - possibly as our school and all those near by treat reception as geared to 4 year olds and is very much play based and the kids are happy.

I think a few 20min activities based on phonics and numbers in the morning followed by tons of free play and child-led exploration and small groups working on practical tasks for the rest of the day seems about right for 4 year olds? They learn to make friends, work with others, look after their possessions, follow instructions, go to the toilet unaided, dress and undress for PE, choose and eat lunch, select their own activities, colour, build, paint, cook, plant stuff, junk model etc. Most happily pick up basic reading just fine.

There obviously must be schools out there that have reception children doing much more formal stuff by what people say. I am horrified when I hear of reception children getting daily formal home work at the likes. The worst near us seem to the private schools and those in areas where prep for grammar is expected from the offset. That's what I think people should object to.

I would add that there are roughly 90 nursery parents at our school anxiously awaiting allocations.Typically about 15-25 wont get into reception due to siblings and distance. They all know this fact.
There will be about 50-60 sibling places. Some now live miles away.There are siblings that will appear and get in who attend different/private or no nursery.
There are children at different/private or no nursery that live closer. This normally accounts for 10-15 places too.
Those parents are all be immensely stressed about it all by now as they have no control over where there child gets allocated. Some have good schools as a back up, plenty don't. Some may end up travelling miles to a school they don't want. That's a much bigger concern IMO

this thread seems very out of line with the real worries parents have regarding admissions

Never a truer word was spoken, tiggy. It's like being cornered by a bore at a party. A rude bore.

I totally agree that the problem is too few schools places, too little slack in the system and poor planning (exacerbated by policy shifts that prevent LAs having control over this).

The suitability of reception classes does, I think, vary quite widely. DS2's reception class was a lovely, totally suitable, play-based experience run by imaginative staff who clearly understood young children well. He has a late August birthday and absolutely thrived (he was pretty exhausted by it all, but that's ok; he's still exhausted by the end of term coming towards the end of Y1 - and DS1 is pretty exhausted in Y10).

However, I know that other local schools are much more formal. In fact the schools with the most middle class intakes tend to be the most formal. Friends' children attend one such school and they have had formal handwriting homework right from the start of reception every week. They also get regular maths, reading and spelling homework at this point in the year. In fact, they get more homework than DS2 does in Y1 (we've got daily, or thereabouts, reading practice and weekly spelling, plus the very occasional project). I would imagine DS2 would have struggled more in that school than where he is.

Thing is, parents can't actually choose between the schools based on what they want/think will work for their child. There's a thin veneer of choice within the system, but you will simply get a place where there's spaces. The super-formal reception school was the only school my friends (who all live close together) could get a place in and was their emergency 'choice'. They all live within walking distance of us, but we live in the middle of a very small circle of several schools which gives us genuine choices that they didn't have because they live a bit further away.

It might be better if more were done to explain what the system actually is (although I'd imagine the political will is not there as most parties are keen to encourage the idea that they let parents choose). It's not 'parental choice' in any meaningful sense for a great many people. All they can do us express their preferences, but too often parents need to do a lot of work to figure out what the chances of their preference gambles coming off are. That's an awful situation that most people find quite tricky, but that must be a nightmare of you are new to the country or lack English or literacy skills etc.

I think the families with children in nursery who may not get a place situation is always going to be inevitable. You cannot prioritise those children whose families were in a position to have them attend the nursery class over those children (who live closer) whose parents needed to send them to a private nursery for childcare reasons (or who moved or any of the numerous other reasons that they might not have been able to send their child to the school nursery). That's simply not fair.

The siblings issue is also very tricky. In some ways, the fairest solution would be to have some sort of priority areas or maximum distances for which sibling priority holds, after which children are treated like non-sibling applicants. However, that only works if schools don't vary in popularity (e.g. a school in special measures that people who live far away are allocated as a last resort that turns round to become outstanding and all the local parents then want places; I'm not sure it's fair to have the families who originally drew the short straw to not have sibling priority and need to get two children to two schools at opposite ends of a town) and if there are no anomalies like bulge classes (which are often filled by families who didn't choose the school but there were no other spaces).

It's presumably a bit of an administrative nightmare to qualify that kind of rule with 'if the family have moved since their child started school'. People don't always have the kind of control over where they live that this kind of rule imagines them to have. People in rented accomodation often have to move because their LL gives them notice and then can struggle to find somewhere to rent. It's happened to us in the past and we ended up having to move from 5 minutes walk from the school to a 30+ minute drive away in a tiny village because there was nothing suitable available in the local area at all.

It seems very hard to prevent people gaming the system by purposefully living near popular schools for a short time then moving out to a bigger/cheaper house because they know they've secured schools places for all their children through sibling priority without disadvantaging many other people.

this thread seems very out of line with the real worries parents have regarding admissions

Definitely agree!

I thought the faith admissions discussion was v important - this is something that comes up all the time in my conversations with other parents (oversubscribed Greater London borough) and the overwhelming majority of people I talk to seem to think that it's outdated and should be scrapped.

This is interesting:

www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/12/uk-one-of-worlds-least-religious-countries-survey-finds

CalamitouslyWrong - that's what I thought re variances. And yes the one school I felt near us was too formal was a very MC school were lots of parents go private at 11 and there is a lot of tutoring etc. Its a broad statement but one that rings true between my friends and all the different schools (posher areas, reception kids seem to be pushed harder). The more city schools with very diverse catchments are more creative and play focused.
I wasn't suggesting that nursery should aver offer priority, but just that their biggest concerns is where they will be allocated, not that their 4 years olds are not ready - but then they have all been at the school nursery, so of course they are uuum.

I like the concept of loss of sibling place if you move further away (e.g for us over 1 mile could work as distance is always less than 0.5m) as a default unless a family can show that it was beyond their control etc
Our school is one where people move and then locals cant get it tho.

Ionone I think anyone who followed the thread from the beginning would agree that the faith school issue is a hot topic. It certainly completely throws the admissions round near me. 2 out of 3 of our local schools are Christian faith with baptism / church attendance criteria.

I thinks its realistic that only 30% of UK call themselves religious as this will include a large number of non CoE or RC people. But not when they fill their school application in, then they find god...

I do think it would be a lot easier if all schools at least with one LA had the same criteria - its a nightmare when you have every school with its own sub set of rules to negotiate

I would agree that the biggest issue is lack of slack in the system. It is what creates most of the other issues.

For example, the whole sibling thing. I grew up in a medium sized town with about 4 or 5 primary schools. If parents moved house to the opposite side of town, often the children would move schools too. Today, once you have got your child a school place, you have to hang onto it. The idea of having a rule that you would lose sibling priority if you moved over X distance away would be a nightmare for some families because of the lack then of a viable option to get their children attending the same school. You couldn't simply apply for the school nearest your new house and then move the older sibling to match, because there probably wouldn't be a place in Y2/Y3 whatever. So, if you don't get sibling priority at your original school, you're stuffed.

Or the faith thing. Yes, there have always been grumbles. I have family whose kids are in their early 20s who went to the local Catholic school. People moaned then that the Catholics got a 'better' school (even then it was almost entirely faith families). But now, if you have a couple of faith schools near you and aren't of that faith, you may not stand a realistic chance of getting into any local school for your child.

A separate issue which I don't think has been mentioned, but I do think is quite important, is the degree to which pressure on places is meaning you need a fair degree of both local knowledge and to be able to understand fairly sophisticated data to fill in your form correctly. Round by me is a mess of bulge classes. Looking at admission distances for previous years you could easily think "oh, we should be fine for X", not knowing that X took a bulge class two years ago and they will only have 15 non-sibling places. Looking at where neighbours kids go doesn't tell you much any more.

I actually think the children in school nursery whose parents are anxious about where they'll go to school for reception example is a very good illustration of why policy cannot be made on a nimby basis.

To those parents, it seems absolutely obvious and fair that their child gets a place at the school they attend for nursery. The parents may well have chosen this nursery because they believe it's the best school for their child. They are likely to believe that the continuity will be best for their child, and so forth. For many of them it may seem deeply unfair that a child who has been in private nursery (for example) can swoop in and get a place at the expense of their child who has been part of the school community for up to 2 years. And, from their perspective, it certainly looks that way.

However, they're not looking at the overall picture and can't see the consequences and problems caused by what might seem like an 'obviously fair' (to them) solution of giving nursery class children priority over others. Lots of school admission issues are exactly like this. Obviously (as we've seen in this thread) the summer born campaign is, but so are issues like faith schools, sibling priority, how to measure distance from schools and just about anything else you can think of with school admissions.

Of course individual parents are going to want the best for their children, but that applies to just about all parents and all children. Just because something seems like the perfect solution for one group does not mean it's a good idea, not least because it can sometimes make things worse for others (and usually others who are not in a position to make as much noise or speak to the right people as you).

It's a bit of a nightmare but, as Tiggy has pointed out, the issues are magnified when the system has too little space (or, in the case of summer born children, the provision is not always appropriate). Out of catchment siblings and faith schools really don't matter as much when it doesn't affect where you can send your child to school. It matters an enormous amount when all the schools near you are faith schools and your child is bottom of the list everywhere. Your child being the youngest or oldest in the year doesn't matter much when the provision is appropriate for all 4 and 5 year olds; it may matter a great deal if you have no choice and are allocated a school that gives homework and expects reception to be a lot like Y1.

Penguin that's a good point re bulge classes and more info. No where near us has bulge classes (which do really skew things). There have however been schools which have expanded. You may look at the last 3 days data for one of our local schools and see that the distance was 0.4, 0.42, 0.43 etc and then 0.64. This was not due to dropping popularity but that it is now 90 not a 60 intake. It would be easy to discount a school that you could now get into.This applies to 4 schools within a couple of miles of us. Those with strong local knowledge and who have been really researching would know this but not many.

A separate issue which I don't think has been mentioned, but I do think is quite important, is the degree to which pressure on places is meaning you need a fair degree of both local knowledge and to be able to understand fairly sophisticated data to fill in your form correctly. Round by me is a mess of bulge classes. Looking at admission distances for previous years you could easily think "oh, we should be fine for X", not knowing that X took a bulge class two years ago and they will only have 15 non-sibling places. Looking at where neighbours kids go doesn't tell you much any more.

I was vaguely alluding to this earlier (but poorly). It is not at all good that the system requires complex analytic skills in order to make any use of the preference system. It's bad for everyone, but particularly disadvantages certain groups who (for a range of reasons) will find it more difficult to navigate the whole thing.

Sorry about starting again on the summer born thing but until the cohorts from the first years of 3 term YR for all (4 years ago-ish?) go through the end of KS2 and onto GSCEs we won't have data to say that this recent 'fix' for summer borns is working or not.
I thought it was a step in the right direction. I think parents can state a preference about when to start during the year and whether to do a full day or not.
The EYFS should be about play and a smooth transition from nursery to YR, especially for those in the attached school nursery.
Unfortunately things like the phonics test and other targets are forcing schools to ramp up the 3Rs in YR, even our nursery does phase 2/3 phonics

Doc and that's where it starts to go wrong. The formalising of education for 4 year old then does easily creep in as they are prepping for the phonics test I guess.... Ikes

Doc - Is that a school nursery? Yikes! Our playgroup does nothing more taxing in terms of 'formality' than sometimes asking the oldest children to sit still for a story!

Yes, ridiculous isn't it? I'm sure it's not necessary but that's what they've decided to do to take the 'pressure' off cramming it all into YR. Other schools will approach it a different way, I wish we did!

I don't get it. Surely a lot of kids at the school don't go to the nursery . Also, if they are cramming stuff into YR, aren't they too focused on test scores and not enough on the kids? Sounds sad all round. This is why I totally agree with people saying we need more play based YR, for all schools and not just some.

I would love to know teacher views on whether the phonics test is driving this? The endless testing seems to be sucking the fun out of KS1??
Can academies opt out ?

Discussion of the phonics test on the Primary board by teachers seems to suggest that it is something very easily passed by children who have actually been taught phonics and have no additional needs preventing them from taking advantage of this. Sadly there are tons of schools that are not teaching phonics particularly well. Like SATS, the phonics test started off as a way to measure a school's effectiveness at delivering basics and has now morphed into a source of stress for children and parents.

I must say, from what I have seen of it, it seems hard to believe that you'd need to start phonics in nursery for a child to pass it. It really is not that hard!

Thanks Ionone. I'll look. I wondered as there has been no mention of it at our school, either by teachers or other parents.

Or ours. Which year is it done?

Year 1. Looks like June

There was no mention of it at our school, either. In fact, my daughter was unaware that she had done a test (she passed). I think that's as it should be!

Interestingly now I have looked, all the local schools have their phonics check results on their web sites. The formal school I was referring to earlier has a very very high pass rate. I guess they all want to be seen as excelling