Reception Class Appeals

[bexnflex]

Hi, im just after some advice from anyone that can help, my daughter has been refused a reception place at the 2 schools of choice due to all classes being full (although being in the catchment area), she has then been offered a place at a school half a mile closer with an appaling ofsted report (which I have no desire to send her to).
My daughter has attended the Nursery of the my first preference for over a year and since day one has received speech therapy due to have not having speech that is age appropriate (although this is not recognised as a "special need").
Basically I need to know if this will help with my appeal as to "outsiders" 50% of the time what is being said is unrecognisable and to move school I feel will affect the progress of her learning and social skills and may alienate her from her peers.

Any help/advice will be appreciated.

[admission]

If the two schools are not subject to the infant class size regs, then you have more chance of convincing an appeal panel that it would be appropriate to have a place at your preferred school. However if they are infant class size then there is only a very small chance of success I am afraid as the only reason to succeed is that the admission authority have made a mistake.

[prh47bridge]

As Admission says, you are unlikely to succeed with an infant class size appeal (i.e. the school has 30 children in each class in the infants).

If you do appeal, don't mention the Ofsted report - that won't help you. Concentrate on the other factors you mention.

[bexnflex]

Thanks both prh and admission for the response, my school of choice had previously always admitted 3 reception classes of 30 and it is only the last intake (sep 09) that it was decided to reduce this down to 2 classes (supposedly to reflect the reduced number of applicants), althought the school governors did log an objection to this it went ahead anyway. Basically what I am asking is does this stand any ground with the appeals panel, the school does and always had been able to accomodate more pupils and the fact that myself and a few other parents have been refused admission on the grounds of class size seems a contradiction to there reasoning to reduce intake numbers.

Any suggestions anyone

[prh47bridge]

The LA, as admission authority, sets the admission number. It is supposed to base this on the capacity of the school, although they are allowed to set an admission number that is higher or lower than that indicated by the capacity.

The School Admissions Code says that there is a presumption that proposals to expand successful and popular schools should be approved. It doesn't say anything about reductions but it seems to me that the presumption should be against reducing the size of a successful and popular school. However, it may be that other schools were more popular and successful than this one and therefore this one got hit when they needed to reduce the number of places.

It is up to the governors to determine how to organise the school. The LA has no right to tell them to reduce the number of classes. I'm assuming there were 3 classes in years 1 and 2 as well. If there were 3 classes in Reception but only 2 in Y1 and Y2 the school was breaking class size law, which puts us in a different situation.

Having said all of that, if the school has reduced the number of reception classes this will be an infant class size appeal. The appeal panel has to judge based on the number of classes the school currently operates unless the governors have decided to change the number from September. So I'm afraid this doesn't carry any weight with the appeal panel. They can't admit another 30 children on the basis that there used to be 3 reception classes even if there is enough space to increase the number of classes.

The only way to dispute the admission number is through the Schools Adjudicator. Unfortunately the deadline for objecting would have been around May last year. You can still try but you will have to provide a good reason for not objecting earlier. Given the objections from the governors it may be that the Schools Adjudicator has already ruled on the reduced admission number. You can check this on their website here.

[admission]

I think you need to do some investigation. Firstly has the LA as the admission authority reduced the admission number of the school officially. I would be amazed if this is not the case but you need to check what was agreed by the Schools Admission Forum and Council in March / April 2008. There should be a section where they set out the changes proposed to the PAN (published admission number). This you should find somewhere on the Council's website. Then check that the figure quoted co-incides with the figure quoted in the primary admission booklet that would have come out in September 2009.

In the Council documents it should also have stated why they were reducing the PAN. One would assume from what you have posted it will say that this reflects the actual number of pupils wishing to have a place at the school. It is quite permissable for the admission authority to set a lower PAN than the net capacity of the school but it then has to re-affirm that each year. The net capacity of the school is a measure of the actual amount of space in the school that can be realistically used for teaching. In primary schools this tends to relate to the number of classrooms more than anything else and assuming they meet the minimum size requirements they will set each classroom as 30 net capacity.

If the school was a 3 form entry school it will have 7 x 3 classrooms = 21. But as it reduces to 2 form entry more and more classrooms will become surplus to requirements. If this happened last year for september 2010 there will be 2 surplus classrooms. What you need to discover is whether these classrooms still exist and if so what is happening to them. Are they being used and if so for what? In fact what is the plan for all 7 spare classrooms that will become available over the next few years.

Whilst I accept it is a weak arguement in an infant class size regs case, the school could actually have capacity to take an extra 30 pupils in the year group,no matter what the PAN is set at. The LA cannot say the school is full as there are spare classrooms, so they will justify the ICS case by saying they have to provide an extra school teacher. Clearly if only a couple of parents are appealing for places, then it is no brainer that a panel would allow further pupils in, but how many appealants are there? If it happened to be more than 20 then I believe the panel will have a difficult decision to make, accept the ICS regs arguement or accept there is the capability to put on an extra class.

Do you know whether there were appeals last year and what happened? Have there been any in-year successful appeals into current reception year are also worth establishing. That will give you a clue as how things might work out at appeal.