School Admission Appeals

Admission process

What is class size prejudice?

For Key Stage 1: Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 appeals since September 2001, by law, no infant class can have more than 30 pupils with a single teacher.

You can find out whether the school you are appealing for has classes of 30 by either phoning the school or the Admissions and Attendance Team.

If there are less than 30 pupils in the class you are appealing for, the Appeal Panel will reach their decision in the following 2 stages:

Stage 1: consider the facts

The Appeal Panel must decide whether offering your child a place at the school would make it difficult for the school to provide effective education or to use resources efficiently.

At this stage, the local authority must prove that would happen if they offered your child a place at the school. If the local authority can prove this, the Appeal Panel will move to the second stage.

Stage 2: find a balance

The Appeal Panel must consider the possible effects on the school and your reasons for wanting your child to go to that particular school before reaching a decision.

If there are several appeals for a particular school, the panel will hear all the appeals and make a note of the main points in each case before reaching their final decisions.

If, after following the 2-stage procedure, the Appeal Panel agrees with so many of the appeals that there would be more than 30 children in the class, the panel can only allow the number of appeals up to the maximum class limit (30 children).

The Appeal Panel will then use the local authority's admission criteria to decide which of those appeals to allow.

If the number of pupils in the classes of the relevant year group at the school which you are appealing for will be over 30, and the local authority has proved that offering your child a place at the school would make it difficult for the school to provide effective education or use resources efficiently because of the size of the class, the following will apply.

The only way in which your appeal can be successful is if:

A reasonable local authority would not have made the original decision in the circumstances of the case; or
Your child would have been offered a place if the local authority had followed the admission arrangements properly

So, when you present your case to the Appeal Panel, you will need to show that:

The school could accept your child without having more than 30 children in the class, and so it would not need to take special measures to bring the class size back to 30
The local authority has behaved unreasonably; or
The local authority has not followed the admission arrangements properly, and your child would have been offered a place otherwise

Contact

Admissions Officer - Appeals

Admissions and Attendance Team

160 London Road

Barking

IG11 8BB

Tel: 020 8227 3146

Fax: 020 8227 3439

Email: admissions@lbbd.gov.uk|