Government has now accepted an application for the proposed new Tiger Primary Free School in Maidstone to open in September 2012. The application now has to go through a number of stages before being approved. The intake is planned to be 30 children from 2012 and 2013, rising to 60 children in September 2014. This will be the first case in Kent where the lack of place planning that goes into approving Free Schools comes head to head with established schools. Applications are now being accepted for the school (although it has not yet been approved) and, as the admission process is planned to be 'independant' (spelling error on application form) of the Kent admission process, it will create havoc ......
INFANT CLASS LEGISLATION
The previous Labour government honoured an election pledge to reduce all Infant classes to 30 children by introducing what is called Infant Class Legislation that banned any class of over 30, except in certain very specific circumstances. Even if those circumstances apply, the school is required within one school year without exception to take 'qualifying measures', which either (a) arrange for two qualified teachers to work full-time with the class; or (b) to split the class into two each with a qualified teacher. Either alternative is a heavy financial burden on any school and very difficult to physically implement in schools with no spare classrooms (the norm). The rules are laid down in the School Admissions Code (SAC) and the School Admission Appeals Code (SAAC), both of which carry the force of law. The rules also apply to Academies.
Parents often puzzle over why they are allowed to appeal and informed of their rights so to do, when they actually stand no chance of success. Sadly, that is the way it is.
The rules for Admissions.
Neither the school nor the Local Authority can offer more places than allowed by the Planned Admission Number, which you will find in the school or Local Authority Prospectus, except in very limited circumstances. SAC states:
2.61 The law does not require a child to start school until the start of the term following their fifth birthday. The date compulsory school age is reached is determined by dates set by the Secretary of State for the autumn, spring and summer terms. These are 31 August, 31 December and 31 March.2.62 Infant classes (i.e. those where the majority of children will reach the age of 5, 6, or 7 during the school year) must not contain more than 30 pupils with a single school teacher. While admission can be refused on normal prejudice grounds once an admission number of lower than 30 (or multiples of 30) has been reached, admission must be refused on “infant class-size prejudice” grounds where the published admission number allows for classes of 30, and the school would have to take ‘qualifying’ measures to keep to the statutory class size limit if more children were admitted, e.g. employ another teacher.
2.63 The class size legislation makes allowance for the entry of an additional child in very limited circumstances where not to admit the child would be prejudicial to his or her interests (‘excepted pupils’). However, every effort must be made to keep over large classes to a minimum. These circumstances are where:
a) children with statements of special educational needs are admitted to the school outside the normal admissions round;
b) children move into the area outside the normal admissions round for whom there is no other available school within reasonable distance (admission authorities must check with local authorities before determining that a child falls into this category);
c) children admitted, after initial allocation of places on the local offer date, because the person responsible for making the original decision recognises that an error was made in implementing the school’s admission arrangements and that a place ought to have been offered;
d) children in care admitted outside the normal admissions round;
e) children admitted where an independent appeal panel upholds an appeal on the grounds that the child would have been offered a place if the admission arrangements had been properly implemented, and/or the admission authority’s decision to refuse a place was not one which a reasonable admission authority would have made in the circumstances of the case;
f) children are registered pupils at special schools and by arrangement with another school which is not a special school, receive part of their education at that other school;
g) children with special education needs who are registered pupils at a school which is not a special school and are normally educated in a special educational needs unit attached to that school, and attend, an infant class in the school (i.e. not in the unit), where this has been deemed as beneficial to the child.
2.64 Except in the case of f) and g), the child will remain an exception for any time they spend in an infant class at the mainstream school or outside the special educational needs unit. In all other circumstances the child will only remain an exception for the remainder of the school year in which they were admitted. Measures must be taken for the following year to ensure that the class falls within the infant class size limit.
The Rules for Appeals
Here SAAC states:
3.19 Where a child has been refused admission to a school on infant class size prejudice grounds, an appeal panel can only offer a place to a child where it is satisfied that either
a) the child would have been offered a place if the admission arrangements had been properly implemented;
b) the child would have been offered a place if the arrangements had not been contrary to mandatory provisions in the School Admissions Code and the SSFA 1998; and/or
c) the decision to refuse admission was not one which a reasonable admission authority would have made in the circumstances of the case.
The third of these cases is usually the one which parents seek to challenge and although it appears reasonably mild, it actually states that the appeal can only be upheld if the admission authority (school or Local Authority) could have gone outside the rules for admission (oversubscription criteria) for the child in question. This is exceedingly rare and relates back to the rules for admission. Many parents seek to challenge the rules themselves, on the grounds that they have a very powerful case for being admitted to that school and not the one they have been allocated and this should have taken priority over the rules, but this is not a valid argument.
The Code wants to leave Appeal Panel members in no doubt as to what 3.19 (b) means and goes on to clarify:
3.25 In order for a panel to determine that an admission authority’s decision to refuse admission was unreasonable, it will need to be satisfied that the decision to refuse to admit the particular child was “perverse in the light of the admission arrangements" i.e. it was “beyond the range of responses open to a reasonable decision maker” or “a decision which is so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question could have arrived at it
Infant Class legislation does not apply only when there is a Planned Admission number of a multiple of 30. Some primary schools combine two different age groups into a class of 30. This can happen when the Planned Admission number is 15, or 20 or a multiple of these. The Code also covers these cases. Other arrangements include smaller reception classes feeding into classes of 30 in Years One and Two. Again the Code covers this case:
3.29 The panel must also consider whether admission of an additional child would cause future infant class size prejudice e.g. a school publishes an admission number of 60, admitting 20 children to three reception classes, which become two classes of 30 children in Years 1 and 2. Admission of a 61st child to reception would lead to one of the Year 1 classes exceeding the infant class size limit unless the school takes remedial measures, such as recruiting an additional teacher. Therefore there would be infant class size prejudice.
Possible reasons for appeal:
(1)you have exceptional circumstances - and if you don't know if your circumstances are exceptional, they almost certainly aren't! Those unlikely to be exceptional include some heart rending cases of difficulty of travel, poor schools allocated, parental commitments, and children heading off in different directions. None of these are likely to be accepted as reasons for AppealPanels to break the rules they are bound to follow.
(2) A second possibility is where Infant Class Legislation does not apply, for example when instead of the normal class size of 30 children, the intake is not a multiple of 10 or 15 (these two numbers allow mixed age classes of 30).
(3) Some church schools where the oversubscriptiuon rules have been loosely drawn up, and contain flaws.
(4) a mistake has been made and a child who is lower down the preference list than you, has been offered a place.
(5) A family has been offered a place on fraudulent evidence. This can be withdrawn, creating a vacant space.
65) a very small number of academies may be prepared to break the rules!
DON'T FORGET TO PUT YOUR NAME ON THE WAITING LIST OF YOUR PREFERRED SCHOOLS.
You can catch me on BBC South East 6.30 this evening, commenting on a case in Thanet, and if they give me air time, more general issues surrounding today's allocations.
I now have details of KCC primary admission data as below
| Pupils | 2011 | 2010 | ||
| No of pupils | % | No of pupils | % | |
| Offered a named school | 15,299 | 94.2% | 14,298 | 95.8% |
| Offered first preference | 13,801 | 84.9% | 13,118 | 88% |
| Offered second preference | 1,080 | 6.7% | 842 | 5.6% |
| Offered third preference | 414 | 2.6% | 329 | 2.2% |
| ooc offered fourth pref | 4 | 0.02% | N/A | N/A |
| Allocated by KCC | 768 | 4.7% | 564 | 3.8% |
| ooc not offered a place | 182 | 1.1% | 67 | 0.4% |
| Total of applications | 16,249 | 14,920 |
You will find the parallel Medway statistics here.
Early thoughts: These are very disappointing results given that KCC itself warned of pressures on Kent Primary places in 2011.......