Summary: Mrs B, complains the Council did not deal correctly with her on-time application for a reception class place for her child, or with her appeal for a place at a school for which she made a late application. The Ombudsman finds no fault in the way the appeal was dealt with, but some fault in how the on-time application was dealt with. However, that fault did not lead to injustice for Mrs B.

The complaint

1. The complainant, whom I shall call Mrs B, complains the Council did not deal correctly with her application for a school place for her child, or with her appeal for a place at School X.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints of injustice caused by ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. I have used the word ‘fault’ to refer to these. We cannot question whether a council’s decision is right or wrong simply because the complainant disagrees with it. We must consider whether there was fault in the way the decision was reached. (Local Government Act 1974, section 34(3), as amended)
3. If we are satisfied with a council’s actions or proposed actions, we can complete our investigation and issue a decision statement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 30(1B) and 34H(i), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

4. I considered all the information provided by Mrs B about her complaint. I made written enquiries of the Council and took account of the information and evidence it provided in response.
5. I provided Mrs B and the Council with a copy of this draft decision and gave them the opportunity to comment.

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What I found

Background

6. Mrs B applied online to the Council for a reception class place for her child. She gave her first preference school as School Y and her second preference as School Z. These were on-time applications.
7. Mrs B did not express a preference for School X. although she has an older child who attends that school.
8. Mrs B gave her correct and current address, Address A, on the application form.
9. The Council offered a place at School W. It says the child did not meet the criteria to be offered a place at either of the stated preference schools, and so School W l was offered as the next nearest school to the home address with an available place. But the offer letter was issued bearing Mrs B’s former address, not the current one from which she had made her application. I will return to this point later in this statement.

Mrs B lodges an appeal

10. On receiving this offer Mrs B contacted the Council to appeal for a place at School X. She set out that the offered school was unsuitable because of the distance from home and the logistics of getting her children to different schools on time each day. The Council updated its records to show School X as Mrs B’s preferred school: this was effectively a late application for School X. An appeal hearing was arranged.

Legislative background

11. Independent appeal panels must follow the law when considering an appeal. The law says the size of an infant class must not be more than 30 pupils per teacher. There are only limited circumstances in which more than 30 children can be admitted. These are called excepted pupils.
12. There are special rules governing appeals for Reception and Years 1 and 2. Appeals under these rules are known as “infant class size appeals”. The rules say the panel must consider whether:

• admitting another child would breach the class size limit;
• the admission arrangements comply with the law:
• the admission arrangements were properly applied to the case:
• the decision to refuse a place was one which a reasonable authority would have made in the circumstances.

13. What is ‘reasonable’ is a high test. The panel needs to be sure that to refuse a place was “perverse” or “outrageous”. For that reason, panels rarely find an admission authority’s decision to be unreasonable in light of the admission arrangements.
14. We cannot question the decision if it has been properly taken. If the panel has been properly informed, and used the correct procedure, then it is entitled to come to its own judgment about the evidence it hears.
15. When a school receives more applications than it has places (the ‘published admissions number’, or PAN), the applications will be ranked according to its over-subscription criteria. Each application will be placed into the highest appropriate criterion, and places are then allocated in descending order of rank.

What happened in this case

16. School X has a PAN of 60 (in two classes of thirty pupils), and more applications were made than there were places available. The Council’s over-subscription criteria in summary are:

• Priority 1, for looked-after or previously looked-after children;
• Priority 2, for children with exceptional medical or social needs;
• Priority 3, for children who have a sibling at the school; and
• Priority 4, for all other applicants who have expressed a preference for the school. Where there are more applicants in this priority group than there are places available at the school, the distance from the child's permanent home address to the school is used as a tiebreaker. A standard straight-line measurement system is applied in all cases.

17. The Council ranks all on-time applications first, before ranking late applications.
    Mrs B’s application for a place at School X was properly treated as a late application.
18. Mrs B submitted a written appeal with supporting evidence and attended the appeal hearing where she was able to make her case in person.
19. The Council’s case, as the admission authority for the school, set out that Mrs B’s application had been considered under Priority 4 of the community primary schools admission policy. This was because although he had a sibling at the school, the application for a place here was late and so was considered after all the on-time applications. The tiebreaker had been applied: Mrs B’s home is 0.744 miles away from the school, and the last child admitted lived closer, at 0.393 miles from the school.
20. The clerk's notes of Mrs B’s appeal hearing indicate that she was able to present her case, and that her grounds of appeal and supporting evidence were available to the members of the appeal panel. Having considered the case made by Mrs B and the admission authority, it was for the panel to decide how much weight to give to the evidence before it. The panel was correct to note that this was a late application for School X; that the application was properly considered under Priority 4; and that the last child admitted under this over-subscription criterion lived closer to the school than Mrs B’s child.
21. In infant class size appeals, the panel has very limited grounds to uphold an appeal. The law says an infant class must not have more than 30 pupils. If this number has been reached, as it had the case of School X, the panel can only uphold the appeal if it considers the admissions criteria did not comply with the law; that the criteria were not applied properly; or that the decision to refuse was one no reasonable authority would make.
22. I see no grounds to criticise the panel’s decision here. There is no suggestion the admissions criteria did not comply with the law, nor that the criteria were not properly applied.

The use of Mrs B’s former address

23. I noted at paragraph 9 above that when the Council made its offer of a place at School W, it used Mrs B’s former home address rather than her current one. That was fault. However, this did not cause injustice to Mrs B. This is because even if the correct home address had been used, Mrs B would not have been offered a place at either of the schools she had expressed a preference for on her on-time application. Her first stated preference, School Y, is 0.864 miles from the home address, using the Council’s straight-line measurement system. Mrs B’s child would have been in Priority group 4, and the last child admitted to the school under that criterion lived 0.483 miles away from the school. If the correct address had been used at the time the Council made its offer, Mrs B’s child would have been offered another school, School V, which was not one of her preferences but was the nearest school with vacancies.

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Final decision

24. I have completed my investigation on the basis set out above.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman