School places - Catch-22

Earlier this week I spoke to six anxious parents all waiting to put their case to the admissions appeals panel duly assembled at County hall as to why their child should attend the school of their choice. In all cases an older child was already at the village school and it is a sign of how filled up the schools have become that younger siblings are not able to get into the same school as their elder brothers and sisters. 

I also talked to the people running the procedure at County Hall, who are all decent, knowledgeable and sympathetic to the parents, as indeed are the people on the appeal panel.

The panel members were at pains to explain to parents the limitations of their role: which essentially is to allow an appeal only if the due process of the procedure has not been followed or a perverse or egregious decision made. And given the regularity of this annual process, and the quality of the officers, the procedure is followed, and the county has followed the selection criteria transparently. There simply aren't enough places in our village schools.

But the dilemmas that all this poses for parents are incredible. Do you choose a school because it has pre-school facilities which means you can drop off child A and then fight through the traffic on the A505 to deliver child B? ( I know from my own experience that schools are a bit frosty about early deliveries). Do you take the older child out of the school so they can both be at the same one? If you are renting - and many families are while they try to snap up a hot-cakes selling house in our popular villages - there is a Catch-22 situation where the school will want to see evidence of the rental agreement, but why would you commit to a rental agreement in a village where your children won't be going to school? 

The panel told one group of parents that their role was limited-  rightly - in terms of their role of passing on these issues to the County education department. But my role is not so constrained and I am passing these issues on to officers.Having  talked to the policy team and the admissions manager I have follow up meetings to see how to accelerate plans for more classrooms in the area in schools with the space to accommodate them. This needs to be managed better in future. 

My heart goes out to those families now facing very dIfficult decisions over the wellbeing and future of their children.