By Rory Edwards
Rory Edwards is a local parent, teacher of 28 years and a school governor. He offers us an insight into certain dilemmas parents might face throughout the school year.
By now, parents who have applied for sec-ondary school places will know if they have been successful or not. Congratulations if you’ve been successful but if you haven’t, the appeals process can be a stressful few months. I have, unfortunately, been on both sides of the process: our middle child didn’t get a place at our first choice school and as a senior teacher, I have had to attend the ap-peals when they happened in June.
I want to concentrate on the parental point of view but want to say, as a teacher, please don’t take the decision not to take your child personally. The school and local authority follow the criteria which all parents are in-formed about when applying and given the large numbers of students in an area in any academic year, there is little opportunity to pick and choose any favourites.
Thinking back to when our middle child was given the 3rd choice school, it didn’t take us long to make the decision to appeal. Having read all the information, the most important thing I read was that we could only appeal if we thought the school had not properly ap-plied the criteria. This is difficult to do as we’re not present when these decisions were being made. Having been on appeals panels, many parents do not follow this and go a for an emotional or practical reason, for example, “I want them to go to a girls’ school” (not part of the criteria), “it’s the closest school to our house” (but others live closer) or “their sibling went to the school” (but no longer there).
In our own appeal, we listed 7 items for the panel to consider. 5 of them were practical but I was lucky enough to find 2 bits of infor-mation which could have been deemed as the school incorrectly applying the criteria. My wife would phone the school regularly to ask where my daughter was on the waiting list. At one point, she was number 8 but a week later, she was number 15. When asked why, we were told that the school had applied the criteria for application. We used this piece of information as it didn’t state anywhere that there was a criteria for the waiting list. Next, we found that the dates published by the school were not the same as the dates that were provided by the local authority. This was clearly an oversight by the school as they had forgotten to change the dates from the previous year, however it went down in our appeal. 3 days before our appeal, I received a phone call from the local authority saying that our daughter had been given a place at the school. Cue celebrations and a Tuesday night take-away!! We were lucky but I know many aren’t.
Lastly, remember that the people on the panel are human and may be swayed by circum-stances. We don’t know individual family circumstances so having heard an appeal where a mother had died, a father was work-ing 2 jobs and an aunt living just round the corner from the school, I would have just yes on the spot if I had the power. I was not un-happy when the student was awarded a place at our school.
I want to say that I have been vague with de-tails so as not to identify any schools. If you are going through the process, good luck!