Sheffield Primary, Secondary, Junior School Place Applying Admissions Chaos 2013

By: N_Walayat

Many of Sheffield's parents will have been busy this past month in making postal and online applications for 2013-14 secondary school places, and similarly soon to be followed by applications for primary and junior school places for which there are strict deadlines to adhere to. The minimum expectations of all parents is for a fair and level playing field in the process of applying for school places for their children.

Unfortunately many parents will discover early next year that Sheffield School Pupils Admissions team had effectively excluded them from the process of having the right to choose a school for their children as their children will have been automatically transferred from for instance primary school to a junior school without prior consultation, notification or input from parents with regards to their individual circumstances that will result in a great deal of chaos as parents attempt to pursue school placements in line with the catchment area and siblings circumstances after the deadlines in response to which the Sheffield's School Admissions team will have deemed them to have missed the deadline for having made an application despite the fact that they were never granted the opportunity to do so.

Therefore Sheffield City Council is failing to operate a fair and level playing field for school admissions, the real world consequences of which are that children living at the the same address, rather then being sent to the same nearest catchment area school can be arbitrarily selected to be sent to separate schools right across the city, thus making it impossible for children to arrive and leave at the scheduled school times that results in permanent loss of education of as much as 1.5 hours per day, as the following example illustrates :

What Parents Need to do before 31st of December 2012

If parents are not in receipt of application form and guidance booklets by September of each year, then parents should contact the Schools Admissions Team and and request an appropriate application form for their child to ensure that an application is able to be made in the first instance before the string of official deadlines for Secondary, Primary and Junior Schools as listed below -

• Secondary School - Online deadline 17th October 2012, Postal deadline 31st October 2012
• Primary School - Online deadline 9th December 2012, Postal deadline 15th January 2013
• Junior School - Online deadline 9th December 2012, Postal deadline 15th January 2013

What Parents Need To Do After 15th January 2013

If you missed applying in time for the above deadlines, then you need to contact the schools admissions team and request a school transfer form and then immediately act up on it. The school admissions team may try and persuade you to delay in making an transfer application until late summer (July/ August) i.e. when they have a reduced workload, ignore this and request an immediate transfer form that you need your child's existing school to complete. Again it is your interests to get your application in motion as soon as possible as failure to do so would put you firmly at the back of the queue as it is highly likely that your transfer application will be rejected and thus go to appeal, in which case putting yourself AFTER other appeals have been heard and decided upon will put you at a further disadvantage.

In this example, the pseudo Independant appeals process will conclude that the deadline for applications has been missed without acknowledging the failure of Sheffield School Pupils Admissions to provide a level playing field for all children and therefore pupil placements will be subject to any places being left AFTER all other appeals have been heard by those that were afforded the opportunity to apply for a school place, regardless of potentially far more severe personal circumstances of 'late' applicants.

There is an over 95% failure rate for school appeals, therefore legal representation should be treated as a must otherwise you stand little chance of your appeal being successful, because as parents you are mere amateurs who will be up against veteran professionals representing the School and Education Admissions Team towards which the Panel will skew their decision unless you have a solicitor present to hold the appeals panel to account.

The bottom line is this, that if Sheffield's public sector run School Pupils Admissions Team is incapable of operating a fair and level playing field in the handling of annual applications for all pupils then the City Council should seek to tender the admissions process out to a more competent agency so as to ensure that the process for school admissions is transparent and operated fairly, rather than to disadvantage a large number of pupils who are not afforded the right to have a say in which school they may attend as the decision has already been made for them in the automatic transfer for instance from Primary to Junior schools, whilst other pupils have been afforded their full right to select the school of their choice thus creating a two tier system where the automatic transferees become subject to the whims of the pseudo independant appeals process.

At the end of the day it is the responsibility of elected Sheffield city councilors to ensure that public services are delivered in a competent and fair manner, failure to do so should mean that they should lose their place in the council chamber (be voted out) just as many children are annually denied their right to a place in the nearest school due as a consquence of a two tier system.

By Nadeem Walayat

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

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Nadeem Walayat has over 25 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis focuses on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and housing market. He is the author of three ebook's - The Inflation Mega-Trend; The Interest Rate Mega-Trend and The Stocks Stealth Bull Market Update 2011 that can be downloaded for Free.

Nadeem is the Editor of The Market Oracle, a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication that presents in-depth analysis from over 600 experienced analysts on a range of views of the probable direction of the financial markets, thus enabling our readers to arrive at an informed opinion on future market direction. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

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