Sheffield School Pupils Admissions Fails to Provide a Level Playing Field
Local / Educating Children Oct 29, 2012 - 06:24 AM GMTBy: N_Walayat
Many of Sheffield's parents will have been busy this past month in making postal and online applications for secondary schools, and similarly soon to be followed by applications for nursery and junior school places. 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.
However many of Sheffield's parents will be finding out early next year that the Sheffield School Pupils Admissions team has effectively excluded them from the process of having the choice to apply for school places as they find out after the fact that their children have been automatically transferred from for instance a primary school to a junior school without consultation, notification or input from parents.
Which means that many parents are automatically put at a huge disadvantage when they attempt to pursue school placements in line with the catchment area and siblings circumstances as they are deemed 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 is grossly failing to operate a fare and level playing field for admissions into it's school, the 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 thus resulting in permanent loss of education of as much as 1.5 hours per day, as the following 'real world' example illustrates:
Additionally, 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 are 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 circumstances of the 'late' applicant.
If you are a parent that finds themselves in a similar situation, then you need to contact the schools admissions team immediately and request a school transfer form and then act on it immediately. 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 need to complete. Again it is your interests in getting 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 that will put you at a further disadvantage.
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 external 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 to at least 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 a pseudo independant appeals process.
By Nadeem Walayat
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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.
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