We don’t want you to forget about Alfie while we’re waiting for Ruth Jones MP (to whom we are eternally grateful) to see if she can do something about Alfie’s exclusion from his local comprehensive school.
Please sign and share if you can.
This is a look at one of the issues around Alfie’s appeal. It’s not just about Alfie; other children must be similarly affected which is why we say there should be changes to the system.
Quick recap:
Alfie was the only child out of almost 300 in catchment pupils not to be offered a place at his local comprehensive. The local authority proposed to send him to a school on the far side of the city in a taxi. The taxi cost is around £8,500 to the local authority, for one child. Aside from the mental trauma of being singled out for exclusion and isolated from his friends in this way, the travel times involved would severely compromise after school activities both at home and at new school.
One of Alfie’s parents was diagnosed with cancer just before the appeal, which we think would have increased the detriment of being separated from his peer group and subjected to significantly increased travel times every day.
Alfie’s local school year 7 would only be oversubscribed by one pupil, (the school subsequently accepted several out of catchment pupils on appeal).
It seemed to us that the harm to Alfie outweighed the harm to the school, which is a valid ground of appeal. An appeal was made with support from Alfie’s GP, his primary school, and his sports coaches. The local authority, sadly, chose to vigorously oppose Alfie’s appeal.
Issues with the appeal decision:
Alfie lost his appeal by a majority of 2:1. We think that this is a decision that no reasonable appeal panel would have made. Admittedly we are a biased, but 97,500 of you seem to agree, so we may be right.
Just by itself, the decision is surprising to say the least. But there are additional issues, here are a couple of examples:
1. The appeal panel were made aware, with ample supporting evidence, that the travel times would compromise Alfie’s ability to attend after school activities. However, the main reason for refusing the appeal appears to be that Alfie would be able to maintain his social contacts through his after-school activities. A complete failure of logic; perhaps they just weren’t paying attention, who knows?
2. The appeal panel were aware that one of Alfie’s parents had recently been diagnosed with cancer. We say that this is a relevant factor that should have been considered.
Paragraph 6.2 of the School Admission Appeals Code says that the decision letter “must” state “…what matters have been taken into consideration.” The decision letter makes no mention of the diagnosis.
The local authority originally told us they didn’t have the power to order a new appeal (even with a recommendation from the ombudsman). This turned out to be untrue. We had relied on this and not complained to the ombudsman because there would be no point. We therefore asked the local authority to order a fresh appeal without recourse to the ombudsman.
The local authority refused, but with the refusal letter came a copy of a handwritten note taken by one of the panel members. The note was entirely redacted (why?) save for three barely legible words. Such is the standard of the local authority’s communication there was no explanation as to why this document was disclosed.
One of the 3 semi legible words appears to be “TURP”. This could be an abbreviation for a type of treatment for cancer (not relevant to the type of cancer suffered by Alfie’s parent but possibly related). It may be that disclosure of this almost entirely redacted document is supposed to indicate that the panel had taken the illness into account, we can’t think why else the document has been sent.
The unexplained enclosure indicates poor communications skills, and also indicates that the local authority can’t distinguish between the panel being aware of something and the panel taking something into account. The rules are clear, if something has been considered, it “must” be in the decision letter.
The local authority is making decisions about children’s futures, surely standards need to be higher.
We have submitted a Freedom of Information request, including the unredacted notes of the appeal panel. The local authority may not be obliged to disclose the unredacted notes, but they are certainly not prevented from doing so. It will be interesting to see what they are not prepared to disclose.
If you can stand it, we’ll have a look at the procedural issues that mean Alfie didn’t get a fair hearing soon.
In the meantime, please sign and share if you can.
As always, we are hugely grateful to everyone who has signed and shared, it truly makes an enormous difference in a number of different ways. Thank you!