11 Plus Exams Forum

I'm having a worry!

When my DD applied for a Reception place many moons ago our first choice was our neighbouring borough (but 5 mins away). We applied through the borough in which we lived. The rest of the choices were within our borough.

On offer day we got offered our 2nd place in our borough. We were disappointed but tried to be positive.

2 days later we got a letter from our 1st choice in neighbouring borough congratulating us on getting us a place. On calling the 2 councils, it turned out they 'hadn't talked to each other' yet but our local council confirmed that if the other one said we had a place in our 1st choice, indeed we had it.

I'm worried about this happening at secondary. Has anyone experience of offer day when applying to other boroughs for their schools? Did they get the correct offer on 1 March?

This does happen to a lot of people around the country and on the whole it works OK.

However... rarely there are occasions where the communications are not as good as they could be. Last year Warwickshire hadn't picked up some out of area children and they had to take places off some kids to give them to those who had missed out in the allocation. A couple of years ago, one of the london boroughs (? ealing) didn't transmit some of the details to Slough - or something like that, it got sorted in the end.

The key thing if you don't get your OOC place on March 1st is to come back to the site and see if others with lower marks / more remote distance are reporting that they have places.

Yes I will keep an eye out on offer day on here, but I'll be really upset if it happens again. It really is an awful rollercoaster to get your 2nd choice, then a day or two later to find out you had your 1st choice all along. They really should be better at coordinating the offers between boroughs. We are in catchment for the school in another borough because we are right on the border - it must surely be quite common?

KingstonMama wrote:Yes I will keep an eye out on offer day on here, but I'll be really upset if it happens again. It really is an awful rollercoaster to get your 2nd choice, then a day or two later to find out you had your 1st choice all along. They really should be better at coordinating the offers between boroughs. We are in catchment for the school in another borough because we are right on the border - it must surely be quite common?

For the most part the system does work, it really is the the exception for screw ups to happen but yes we do see them. Once picked up the LAs/schools usually sort it out very promptly.

On the forum we do look out for oddities.