An update on the school thing

As I said in my last post, M decided that she did want to go to school in September and it is definitely the right decision for her.  I don't know, you bring your children up to make their own decisions and they go and do so!

Since then a few things have happened.  M had another chat with the lovely A, as although she has made the decision and is happy with it, she still understandably has some reservations.  We're also still in the unsettled and therefore unsettling stage of not having anything sorted yet.  I put in the application through the local authority on Monday 20th June over the phone and was told that 'in year applications' (those that are not made before the deadline for general applications at the start of a new school) were looked at on a weekly basis, so we would hear pretty quickly.

This was indeed the case as that Friday, the 24th, I had a phone call.  It was not from the school that we had applied for, nor indeed the one that M had been allocated a place at.  It was from one of the other schools in the same academy chain as the one M wants to go to.  The very pleasant woman on the phone asked me if, since we hadn't been allocated a place at the school we had applied for a place at they had passed my details on to them and would we like to go and have a look around.  I thanked her for letting me know that we hadn't got a place, as I did not know that at the time and declined her offer, as we would be appealling.

Following this, I phoned the school and spoke to the person who deals with admissions.  At this point she apologised saying that it was her who sent out the letters (it later turned out that since we had applied through the LA, the letter should have come from them and that we should/could have applied directly to the school for a place).  She then emailed a copy of the form that we needed to fill in which is a notice of intention to appeal.  I filled this in and delivered it to the school on Monday 27th June.

By the Friday we had still not received any letter about the school place, although we had had a message on our answerphone from the school where M was automatically allocated a place, telling me that they had next year's Year 7s going into school for most of the following week for visits and asking would M like to join them.  I returned the call to thank them and decline the place at the school which is a considerable distance away and where M would know nobody.  I called the admissions person back at the school M wants to go to, to try to find out when the appeal was likely to take place and also to let her know that we still had not received the letter we were expecting.  It was at this point that we cleared up the confusion about where the letter should have come from and she said that she would chase that up for us with the LA.  She also told us that there was an appeal hearing scheduled before the summer holiday but that it was full, so ours would not be until September.  She did agree to check with the appeals clerk whether it might be possible to fit ours in as well, but said she thought it unlikely and that we weren't the only ones waiting and indeed called back very promptly to confirm that we will have to wait.  M was accepting but really not happy about this and asked me if I thought if she were to write a letter to the school asking really nicely, they'd let her go.  I had to tell that sadly I didn't think it would work.

We finally received the letter letting us know that M had not got a place at the school she wants to go to but that she's been allocated at one that she will definitely not be going to on Thursday 7th July, dated the 5th. 

In the meantime, however, I have been talking to H, who has been very helpful having been through the appeals process with her daughter L when they moved house.  She also very kindly let M tag along to an evening event for the new Year 7s earlier this week.  In addition she also let me know that when L came home from a day at the new school with a photo of her form (as did some other friends in different forms) that the three forms that she knows about have only 27 or 28 children in them.  Given that there are, I believe, nine forms in Year 7 in September, I find it hard to believe that there isn't space for at least two children in each of them.  So even if there were a dozen appeals to be heard in the session before the summer holiday, all of them for Year 7 places and all of them won, I don't see how they could legimately argue that they can't accommodate another child.

Before I learned about the class sizes, I was pretty sanguine about the whole thing, but I must admit that I am really rather annoyed that a child who has applied for a place 'in year' (not that they applied but were refused a place with the general intake), who lives in catchment (all children living in catchment were guaranteed a place this year) is being made to jump through these hoops given that there is clearly space at the school!  I know that we missed the deadline back in October, but at that time neither of my girls had any intention of going to school for the foreseeable future and I don't see that it's any different than if we had moved into the area and as a result M, and any other children in this position are going to miss out on the beginning of the school year and the settling in period that everyone else will have.