Secondary school place withdrawn by Council School Admissions

[Ladymum03]

Hello:

We received the letter from School admissions today offering us our first option "Grammar School" in our area.

Everything was perfect until I did contact schools admissions to ask how can I accept the offer, they confirm the school place and said that I don't have to do anything as my son has an EHCP in place.

45 minutes later I had received another call from Schools admissions saying that the letter was wrong and that they will reissue the letter offering us our second option, as it is named in our EHCP.

What can I do to get our first option place reinstead?

Do I have to appeal?
what can I do?

How they can offer a place in writing and later say no!! my son is devastated.

Many thanks

There are separate admissions processes. If a pupil has an EHCP the secondary admissions process is managed by the SEN team, not admissions. The receiving school should be consulted as to whether they can meet need in addition to the qualifying selection process for grammar. It sounds like the admissions team were not aware an EHCP was in place and processed the application in error.

Haveasay - yes, that's right. But when we apply online we apply under EHCP grounds?
I do really don't understand how they could make this kind of mistake is outrageous! and very unprofessional as they have about 5 months to work with the allocations.
Many thanks for your comment, I do really appreciate it.

You need to contact your caseworker. We had a mess with the paperwork (i.e. Admissions wrote a year after he'd transferred ) so not uncommon. We had a "transfer review" which was dealt with by the SEN team at the LA which is a bit like an annual review and they reissued the EHCP naming the new school. (We'd viewed school, spoken to Senco etc etc before everything was agreed and finalised)

Once you had the EHCP, your child should have been taken out of the normal admission process altogether, so you shouldn't have been offered anything at all.

That said, if you preferred another maintained mainstream school, you should have been given your preference through the EHCP process. A local authority can only refuse to meet your preference for a mainstream school if having your child there would be incompatible with the efficient education of other pupils and there are no reasonable steps that can be taken to overcome the incompatibility. It's very difficult for a mainstream school to prove that, particularly if the child then gets placed in another mainstream school of a similar type. If it's less than two months since the EHCP was issued, you might be able to appeal go the Special Needs Tribunal in relation to the placement.