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School choice: your rights

A guide to the admission process

  • Your child has the right to a place in school while they are between the ages of 5 to 16 years old.
  • You have the right to say which school you would prefer your child to attend, regardless of the school's location. Your right to express a preference does not guarantee you a place at the school if it is oversubscribed.
  • By law, your local authority (LA) must offer your child a school place.
  • If your child is not offered a place at your preferred school, you have the right to appeal to an independent panel.

You must complete an application form when applying for a school place for your child at each of the transition stages in your child's school life, for example between nursery and infant/primary school and between primary and secondary school.  It is important to carefully check what the arrangements are for the schools in your area.

If your child is not offered a place in school

If you are not offered a place at your preferred school or if you are unhappy with the school place allocated to your child, for whatever reason, you have the right to appeal to an independent panel.

The letter you receive from the local authority notifying you of your offer of a school place should also provide information on why your application to particular schools may have been turned down, and about your right to appeal. This letter will explain what to do next, but you must make sure you make your appeal within the deadline given.

The result of your appeal will depend on the strength of your case. In most admission appeals, the panel goes through two stages:

  • Stage 1 - The school's admission authority explains to the panel why it did not offer you a place. The panel decides whether the school's published admission arrangements were correctly applied, and whether there was a good reason for turning down the application (the phrase sometimes used is "whether the admission would be prejudicial to efficient education or efficient use of resources" for example where the school had very small classrooms and couldn't fit your child in without making the space too cramped for good teaching and learning).  If the Appeals Panel is not satisfied that either of the above are true, it must uphold the appeal at this stage and your child will be admitted to the school.  However, if the Panel does decide there was a good reason for turning down your application, it will go on to the second stage where the panel hears your case and why you are appealing against the decision.
  • Stage 2 - You can mention all the reasons why that school would be the best for your child, and what special factors justify your child being offered a place at the school, in spite of the reason(s) for turning you down. The panel then makes a balancing judgement. This is where they decide whether the benefits for your child going to the school you are appealing for - instead of the school you have been offered - outweigh the effect on the school and its other children of having one more pupil in the class. If the appeal panel decides that your case is the stronger, it will uphold your appeal and the admission authority is then obliged to admit your child to the school.

Different rules apply if your admission application is refused because an infant class has reached its legal limit of 30.

The law limits the number of pupils in an infant class with one qualified teacher to a maximum of 30. In this type of appeal, the panel is only allowed to look at two things:

  • Whether the admission authority stuck to its own rules which were published in its admission arrangements. If the admission authority broke its own rules - either deliberately or by mistake - then your appeal can succeed, but only if your child would have been accepted if the rules had been applied properly.
  • Whether the admission authority acted unreasonably. The law defines "unreasonable" very carefully in these cases. The courts have said that for a decision or action to be "unreasonable" it must be completely irrational or not based on the facts of the case. These facts include the published admission arrangements for the school, the number of applicants and the capacity of the school to admit pupils without breaching the infant class-size limit.

Please note: you may give the panel fresh information relating to your case, which was not available at the time the decision to refuse admission was made. However, the panel can only use this to help it determine whether, in the circumstances (which at the time of the hearing will include the fact that all available places have already been allocated), the original decision was irrational.

What happens next

If your appeal succeeds (ie the panel upholds your appeal), the admission authority must offer your child a place at the school. If your appeal does not succeed, you can ask the school to put your child on their waiting list (if the school has one), as places sometimes become free after the start of the school year.

If you are unhappy about the way the appeal hearing was carried out, you could complain to the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO).  The LGO can investigate written complaints about maladministration on the part of an admission appeal panel.  This is not a right of appeal and has to relate to issues such as failure to follow correct procedures or a failure to act independently and fairly.  You can not refer a complaint to the Ombudsman simply on the basis that you are not happy with the outcome of your appeal.

There are three LGO offices in England, each of them deal with complaints from different parts of the country.

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If your preferred school is very popular

The Government wants as many parents as possible to obtain a place for their child at their preferred school. Most schools have enough places for each child who applies, but some schools are very popular and receive more applications than there are places available.

As a guide, the local authority booklet and the school's own prospectus must tell how many applications they received in the previous year, compared to the number places they had to allocate.

If there are more children wanting places at a school than there are places available, the admission authority will follow a set of rules to decide who to offer places to. These rules (which are sometimes called "oversubscription criteria") must by law be fair and objective, and must be published each year in the school's prospectus and in the LA's booklet.

When oversubscribed, all admission authorities must give highest priority in admissions to looked after children/children in public care  If your child has a statement of Special Educational Needs (SEN), a school will be named in your child's statement. The school named must admit your child, even if the school is full.

Some commonly used rules for oversubscription criteria include:         

  • whether your child has a brother or sister already at the school
  • whether you live in the area the school serves (the catchment area)
  • whether your child goes to a school linked to the school of your choice (a feeder school)
  • faith based - e.g. baptised Roman Catholic
  • whether there are particular medical or social reasons why your child should go to the school
  • how far away from the school you live

Different admission authorities will use different types of rules. They must all state in their prospectuses, the order in which they will apply their rules, saying which ones they will use as a tiebreaker. For example, if brothers and sisters is the first rule, the authority should offer places to all children with a brother or sister in the school before they offer places to anyone else. If your preferred school is popular, look carefully at these published rules and carefully consider whether you think you have a chance of obtaining a place. If in doubt, ask your local authority or the school for advice. You will find additional information in the ParentsCentre's admissions and applications section.

Admissions Criteria

It is very important you read the admissions criteria for all the schools in your area, to assess accurately at which school you have the best chance of gaining a place for your child. This will help you to make realistic choices of which schools to apply for.

Although you may live near to a school, there is no guarantee that you will be offered a place because of this. Each school will offer places on the basis of their own admission criteria, and distance from the school may not always be one of those criteria.

Alternatively, if your preferred school is very popular and one of its rules for allocating places is 'brothers and sisters' and your child doesn't have a brother or sister there, you need to consider whether there are other criteria for that school that your child may meet, or whether it would be wiser to state a preference for another school where your application has a more realistic chance of success.

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