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School admissions Maladministration causing injustice
27 June 2007
A girl was wrongly refused a place at St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School, Dulwich, because the admissions criteria were not properly applied. The Ombudsman finds that an accurate assessment was not made of the parishes the families lived in, and so the prioritisation was not correctly carried out. If this had been done properly, one complainant’s daughter would have been offered a place, but the second complainant’s son would not. The School has now agreed to offer the girl a place, and apologise to the second complainant. ‘Mr Wilson’ and ‘Mr Spencer’ (not their real names for legal reasons), both appealed against the School’s refusal of places for their children to begin in September 2006. The Admissions Appeal Panel upheld the refusals. Mr Wilson and Mr Spencer complained that the Panel failed to consider properly how the Governing Body had applied the admissions criteria in respect of residency and place of worship, and did not give adequate reasons for its decisions. Both complainants felt that their children may have unfairly missed out on a place at the school. The Ombudsman concluded that the admissions criteria were not correctly applied. No accurate assessment was made of the parish of residence of all the applicants, and so the prioritisation in order of the listed parishes was not correctly carried out. The appeal statement contained inaccurate information that misled the complainants, and the Appeal Panel was unable to consider the appeals properly because it did not have all the information. Also, the waiting list was not operated in any discernible order and the Panel’s decision making was not in accordance with the Code of Practice. The Ombudsman concluded that Mr Spencer’s daughter had wrongly lost a place due to these errors. Mr Wilson’s son did not wrongly lose a place, but Mr Wilson had been given incorrect information in the appeal statement, which meant he did not know the true case against him. The School has accepted the Ombudsman’s recommendations that it should:
Date Published: 16/10/08
are in .pdf format. To view these files you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader software. It can be downloaded below free of charge. Click To Download