Why Bother to Fight School Appeals?

I feel that I should explain why I am writing about school appeals in such seemingly endless detail.

As a parent, you get very used to feeling (if not being) completely responsible for your child’s progress through life. You’re the one who puts them into bed at night. You’re the one who stops them drowning in their own dinner.

All of a sudden - with the allocation of a school place - your total responsibility is wrested away from you and “The System” decrees from upon its impersonal, dizzy heights what is going to become of this person who you have made every decision for, whose interests have been your guiding principle since before they were born.

Of course parents imagine out a life for their kids – and of course that involves going to a good school, getting a good education and being successful. I’m sure it must happen, but I almost cannot comprehend parents being indifferent about the school their child goes to, considering how much of their (the child's) subsequent life they are going to spend there, in the company of and under the influence of people other than themselves.

When The System declares, “Sorry, we can’t all get what we want – so you’ll have to just make the best of it” and you imagine the potentialities of your child being wasted or going unrealised simply because you COULD NOT BE ARSED to challenge The System, then you HAVE TO fight it.

It would be nicer and more just if this didn’t matter. Of course I’d like to see all schools as good as one another, so that nobody has to “win” and nobody has to “lose” – we’re talking about 4 and 5 year old children for god’s sake.

I don’t blame local authorities for having admissions policies that they stick to in order to distribute a scarce resource among an excessive number of valid claimants.

I would perhaps point out that it is often THE SAME local authorities that allow the development of more and more new homes - raking in the council tax from increased population - without providing for a corresponding increase in infrastructure like primary schools anywhere near the new developments they profit from.

Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and it has to be dealt with in its current, imperfect form.

If EVERYONE appealed against The System, then The System might have to take a look at making itself a little less unjust, for the sake of an easier life. It’s only the silent acquiescence of the majority who don’t bother that lets them get away with it.

I’m not going to pretend that what we did had any kind of faux revolutionary wider goal like that behind it, but I throw that out there (along with the foregoing) as a pre-emptive strike against anyone who thinks we were selfish to do it. And also fuck you.

So that covers why we appealed and why I want to write about it. It was a bloody significant event in our lives and I still feel triumphant that we got the right and JUST outcome by persistence.

Sadly, thousands of parents are going to go through the same thing next year, and the next year.

When it was happening to us, I wanted to read a “human” explanation or account of it as well as all the legal (and quasi-legal) stuff I came across that could demystify and contextualise it all – and I could not find anything.

When you see that only 16% of appeals succeed, that it’s a legally binding adversarial tribunal and you see the rates that lawyers charge – and the success rates they lay claim to – it can be really intimidating. You want to argue your case on grounds of love, but love is inadmissible in court.

If I can help anyone win their appeal – or just go in there feeling more confident to face down a system that stacks the dead weight of the bureaucracy against the isolated individual – then I will have accomplished what I set out to.

If it doesn't help anyone... well, have some kitttens to redeem the time you wasted here.

How to Win School Appeals – Part 2

So, let’s suppose that having applied to your local schools back in January, now it’s April and you’ve just opened the fatal letter saying that you didn’t qualify for the ones you wanted and instead your child has been given a place at Shithole Primary, Murder Street, Craphill.

What do you do from here?

Before I go any further, I should give a few disclaimers:

1. I am only talking about reception class size admissions appeals here – these are probably the hardest to win and the ones that you are most likely to have to fight.
2. We live in Bradford and my entire experience is based on that city’s schools and education department. Every education authority will have slightly different procedures, so not everything I say will be universally applicable.
3. When we did win our appeal, we were not actually given the reasons why in detail. I went to two appeals, and I lost one and I won one. So am I going to throw everything I learned or was told or suspect at you. Some of it may be completely irrelevant – but some of it must be true.
4. I can see that this is going to take more than two parts to finish – so more wisdom will follow in later posts.

So where do you go from here?

Armalite and ballot box strategy

Well, there is nothing to be gained from refusing to accept the place at Shithole Primary. If you don’t accept it and then you don’t get a place anywhere preferable, your child ends up without a school place at all – and the last thing you want by now is then kicking around the house for another year or getting allocated a last minute place somewhere even worse.

Plus, if you take the place, you look like a good meek little subject who is playing the game by the rules. I was asked whether we had taken up the place and/or otherwise been to and engaged with the unwanted school in both the appeals I went to, so this must be important.

Secondly, put your child’s name down on the waiting lists for all the schools you would prefer. Some people mistakenly think that going on the waiting list and appealing in some way cancel each other out – they don’t.

Chances are, a few kids will drop out or otherwise not take up places they have been offered before the appeals come around – and you might get one of these. They are awarded on the same terms as the original admissions decisions are made, so if you only just missed out on a place on distance there’s a good chance you will get one down this route.

Plus, going on the waiting list puts your case back into the admissions authority’s hands, giving them more time to make a mistake which you can exploit later.

I can’t stress the importance of going on the waiting list enough. It gives you a reason to be on the phone to them all the time collecting information.

Open up as many fronts as you can. Remember, you care a lot and the council doesn’t have to care that much. You only have to get lucky once – they have to get lucky every time.

What you are dealing with

99% of the time, the reason you will have been rejected is down to our friend the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. That is, because there were 30 kids (or a multiple thereof) who met the admissions criteria “more than” you.

This law on class sizes is a trump card in the admissions authority’s hands – however, it is not the Ace of trumps. If it was, the only hope you’d have would be to take a challenge to the European Court of Human Rights and even if you won, your kids would be 18+ by the time you got the primary school place.

No, the class size law is round about a seven of trumps. It woops most other arguments – even ones that seem world-beating from an ordinary human point of view - but it can be defeated.

What you have to prove is that:

1. The admissions authority (usually the council, but if you’re dealing with a church school for example, it could be the governors) made mistakes in applying the admissions policy.
2. If they hadn’t made those mistakes, then on correct application of the policy, your child would have got a place.

Sadly, it’s not enough to show that the council cocked up – which is usually simple enough. Just deal with them for long enough and they’ll do something wrong: hence I recommend that you contact them regularly, ask lots of questions and sooner or later you’ll get some work experience kid who has no idea what they’re talking about misinforming you about something or other. That’s why going on the waiting list actually helps with your appeal.

For that reason, you should note down every communication you have with the local authority for time and date and try to get the name of the person you are talking to. As far as I can remember, they never volunteered this information, which seems significant.

And don’t expect them to call you back when they say they will. Be prepared to chase everything yourself.

Stay tuned for the next instalment – in which I will talk about the power of paperwork and of gossip

Top five things I look for in a barber

I am a simple man with simple hair. This is all I need from the person who cuts it:

1. No appointment necessary
2. No queuing
3. Under a tenner
4. Comfortable with long silences
5. Doesn’t smell bad

The place I went to in Leeds city centre yesterday fulfilled all these conditions. Plus, he had a jar of product on the counter called “Cholesterol”.

Coming soon: the promised second part of "How to Win School Appeals"...

How to Win School Appeals – part 1

It's a minefield...

Roger Jr has been at school for 7 days now at our first choice primary school. Getting him there, however, has been a battle – which only now do I feel philosophical enough to tell the tale of and make light of.

It all started back in November 2011, when we got a bundle of forms from the local authority asking us to declare our five choices of primary schools for Roger Jr to go to.

Fast-forward two months, and a couple of nights before the deadline, we took a look at them and jotted down (i) the local school which all the other kids up our road went to and (ii) a handful of others.

You may well say that not doing piles of research, bribing councillors and vicars and taking long-lens photographs of headmistresses in compromising positions was the first place we went wrong. You may be right – but what reason did we have to doubt that Roger Jr would get into the same school as all the other children who lived up the same road and therefore at more or less exactly the same distance from the school?

Before I continue, let me explain a couple of things. This may not be how it is everywhere else – and for that reason, I would recommend that you read the paperwork you get sent thoroughly and often – but in Bradford straight-line distance from door of dwelling to door of school is the main determinant of priority for admission. Kids in care and siblings of kids already at the school get first dibs (and to the latter, we will return in due course), but then the school’s favour beams outward like a light and blesses the first cohort of nippers it touches.

Cohort? Yes, we have enrolled Roger Jr in a Roman Legionary school. Discipline first, eh?

No, what I mean is that – thanks to Tony Blair – primary schools have to take in reception kids in batches of 30. The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 says that in the first two years of school, the ratio of pupils to teacher must not exceed 30:1. This – as a parent appealing against an admissions authority decision – is your primary enemy.

Already, you can perhaps see that this is an area best not left to chance.

Anyway, back to our story. Time passes and soon it’s April. We get a letter through from the council and it says that Roger Jr has not been offered a place at any of the five schools we applied for. Instead, he has been given one at a school we have never heard of, in a place best characterised as “a demilitarised zone”.

You see, when you are told that as a parent you have a “choice” of schools, this is not what you are being given at all. You are being asked for preferences so that, in the unlikely event of your child being eligible for admission to more than one of those schools, the council has a tie-breaker. That is all your views count for here.

You see, it turns out that there had been a glut of births in Roger Jr’s school year. And as such, the blessed light emitted by our school of choice (or preference) was guttering like a candle in an airtight room, reducing its circumference from over 0.6 miles to a mere 0.45 miles.

That is, there were so many kids of school age apparently living closer to that school than us (and we will return to that “apparently” later on) that we didn’t qualify - for our number one choice or indeed for any of the five we had named.

And so, because we didn’t live close enough to the school 0.6 miles away, Roger Jr was to be shipped off to a school some 2.5 miles away – a triumph of bureaucratic logic.

It looked alright, but not right for us

Now, I don’t wish to slag off the school Roger Jr was given a place at too much. They’re doing the best they can given their location. And they seem to have nice facilities – schools that have been in special measures often do. They had very nice, big playing fields around the school, although I suspect that large areas were probably heavily mined to deter burglary. The staff seemed pleasant enough, and the head was very good about it when we told her that we intended to fight tooth and nail to ensure that our son didn’t go to her school.

So we appealed.

Now, friends and readers of a socialistic bent may disapprove of our having done this.

If every middle class parent whose kids get sent to a “bad” school exploits their special powers of pushiness (a little middle class secret – you get sent on a course where they teach you all that stuff as soon as you start paying 40% tax), then only poor kids will go to the bad schools and rich kids to good schools.

And that, they will tell you (in a bit of reasoning whose rather disturbing premises they are rarely keen to examine more closely) guarantees that bad schools stay bad and good schools stay good.

Well, let me take on my detractors. You are, of course, entitled to your opinions. However, unless you have children of your own, in this case they are worth precisely NOTHING SO SHUT UP.

Not only do I challenge any parent to admit that they are prepared to accept an inferior start in life because of their political views – I also accuse them of mistreating their children. I see no difference between that and, say, forcing your four-year-old to be a vegan because of your views.  

Sorry, but all abstract positions about what is right or just for everyone go out of the window when it’s your own children involved.

Ask me if my preference is for a fair society or for my kids to get on - I don’t have to research my answer to that.

Coming up in Part 2! I might actually explain “how to win school appeals”!