Advice on Appeal day

Consult our experts on 11 Plus appeals or any other type of school appeal

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mattsurf
Posts: 230
Joined: Mon Apr 28, 2008 11:44 am

Re: Advice on Appeal day

Post by mattsurf »

Ambermollie

Good luck in your appeal; having gone through 2 over the past 9 months, I know how stressful it is, and how you want to explore every option and avenue.

I really recommend that you read through the School Admission Appeals Code 2012, see link below

https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... peals-code" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Make sure that you address as many of the points as possible. Section 3.13 specifically mentions "school reports giving Year 5/Year 6 SAT results or a letter of support from their current or previous school clearly indicating why the child is considered to be of grammar school ability"

If you have a letter from your daughters headteacher, make sure that they clearly say that your daughter is of Grammar school ability.

If your daughter has predicted SATs results, go onto the DfE website and pull off the stats that show how many pupils get level 5 in English, Reading and Maths (23% in 2015), also from the DfE site you will see that stage 5 is the level that children should achieve at the end of year 9 (ie 13-14 years old). If you have CATS or CEM tests, show what percentile group that your DD is in (all of this is publicly available). Some panels will know all of this, others won't know, also point out clearly that the Appeals code explicitly states that the panel should look at this type of evidence.

Do not focus too heavily on mitigating circumstances - the old appeals code did have a section which referred to mitigating circumstances on the day, however, the new appeals code does not. The panel should look much more at the evidence of academic ability, it is not their role to assess the mitigating circumstances. However, I do get the impression that lots of panels still consider mitigating circumstances far too much.
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