Parents up and down England will be told whether their child has been given a place at one of their preferred choices of primary school on Monday, 18th April. All children born between 1st September 2011 and 31st August 2012 are eligible for a place to start school in September, but previous years have seen many miss out on their preferred choices.
Elizabeth Coatman, the Good Schools Guide’s state education specialist advisor, can see this year’s announcement bringing further disappointment: “Many children will again be placed in schools which parents feel to be unacceptable. These could have over-sized classes, bad Ofsted reports and might also be a considerable distance from home, making the logistics of the school run harder for families with children at other schools. While there is an appeals process, the chances of success are tiny for infant classes.”
Elizabeth Coatman recommends the following:
* Firstly, you must accept the place your child has been offered. However determined you are to find an alternative, if the initial offer is not accepted, you run the risk of your child having no school to go to in September.
* Once you have accepted the place, get on the waiting lists for other schools you would prefer – even schools not on your initial application. All kinds of things can happen between now and the start of the new academic year which could result in places being freed up.
* If your child has been given a place at a primary school you are not keen on, think carefully and take advice before planning an appeal – you only have a very slim chance of success.
* Instead take a moment to check out the school in greater detail. It might be better than you fear. Even if the local reputation of the school is bad, that could be based on out-of-date information which is no longer relevant. Look at its most recent Ofsted report and if it only scores a 3 or ‘requires improvement’, read the Section 8 monitoring visit report to see if the problems are now being addressed. Speak to parents at the school gate. Find out how young the teaching staff are: having a core of long-serving, older teachers may tell you something about how the staff are treated and how experience is valued.
* Don’t let on to your child if you think the allotted school is a disaster zone. If you bad-mouth the school but then fail to get into another one, your child will start at the new school conscious of the black mark you have already given it.
* If you do end up appealing, remember, you can only appeal to the schools to which you applied. Each school will require a separate appeal. The grounds for a legitimate appeal will be published on your local authority website: the bar for success is very high. You’ll need to prove a mistake was made when the admissions process was carried out, that the admissions policy is unlawful or that no reasonable person would come to that admissions decision – ‘reasonable’ being used in the legal sense.
Elizabeth Coatman concludes, “As the primary age population bulge is still under way, and the number of primary schools is not growing sufficiently to match it, it is inevitable that this year primary schools will get bigger and more children will be taught in classes of more than thirty pupils.”
Photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks
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