Education and learning - Rights and responsibilities:

School choice and your rights

If your child is not offered a place in school

Usually you will be offered a place at one of your preferred schools. However, 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 admission authority for the school should also provide information 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:

The panel hears the case put by the admission authority explaining why it did not offer you a place at your preferred school. The panel decides 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"). An example might be 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 panel does decide there was a good reason for turning down your application, it will begin the second stage of the appeal, where the panel hears your case and why you are appealing against the decision. You can mention all the reasons why that school would be the best for your child, and what special factors justify your child getting in, in spite of the good reason 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 bad effects on the school and the 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, 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, who might recommend a new appeal.

If you want to know more about appeals, contact the admission authority for the school or the school admissions teams at the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

School choice and your rights

If your child is not offered a place in school

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