Few successful appeals for infant class places in 2025.

Posted on August 18, 2025 by John Howson

One consequence in the fall in the birth rate seems to have been a downward trend in appeals over admissions to infant classes. Key Stage 1 classes have been capped at 30 pupils for nearly 30 years now, so it might be expected that parents would be keen to ensure their offspring gained a place at the primary school of their choice. After all, parental choice has been a cornerstone of admissions policy since 1979, regardless of the government in power. The data for 2025 admissions ahs now been added to the tie series by the DfE. Admission appeals in England, Reporting year 2025 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK

	2025
	Primary (infant classes)	Other primary classes	Primary
Admissions	617,802	137,153	754,955
Admission appeals lodged by parents	8,250	6,334	14,584
Admission appeals lodged by parents (percentage)	1.3	4.6	1.9
Appeals heard by an appeals panel	5,128	3,871	8,999
Appeals heard by an appeals panel (percentage)	0.8	2.8	1.2
Successful appeals	499	1,096	1,595
Successful appeals (percentage)	9.7	28.3	17.7

Of the 617,802 requests for places in infant classes, only 8,250 resulted in an appeal, presumably as the child was not placed in the school of the parent’s choosing at offer day. Some parents either accept another school or a place became available, so 3,122 of these appeals were not proceeded with, leaving just 5,128 appeals heard across the whole of England. Of these appeals, only 499, or 9.7% of the appeals heard were successful, presumably because of the class size limit.

Across the rest of the primary age range, there were only 14,584 appeals, or 1.9% of those either moving children during the Key Stage 2 phase or joining for the first time, perhaps because of the imposition of VAT on private school fees in January 2025. Again, a number of these appeals were not heard, presumably again because a place could be found after the appeal had been lodged. Interestingly, the success rate was much higher for these appeals than for the appeals for admission to infant classes, presumably because there is no mandated maximum class size for Key Stage 2 classes.

In the secondary sector, appeals in 2025 were 4.9% of admissions, around the middle of the 4.5 to 5.5 range of the period between 2016 and 2025. Interestingly, the success rate of these appeals has been falling. In 2025, it was only 19.9%, compared with 26.3% of appeals heard in 2016.

As entry numbers are likely to fall in Year 7 over the next few years, it will be interesting to see whether the percentage of successful appeals rises over the next few years. However, it may well be that popular schools remain attractive to parents, and will still have no spare places creating the need to appeal, especially if siblings are not all granted the place at the same school.

The present Bill before parliament should return in-year admissions for all schools to local authority control. At present academies can opt out of a local system and manage their own in-year admissions. As I have not before (Jacob’s Law) this was especially challenging for children in care needing to find a new school place. Hopefully, their needs will be better appreciated in the future.

Don’t forget Jacob

Posted on January 4, 2023 by John Howson

At the end of January, this blog will celebrate its 10^th birthday: a decade of writing. As of today, the blog has published 1,364 posts during those 10 years, with a total wordcount, according to WordPress analytics, of around 800,000 words, or around nine or 10 PhDs. Of course, blogs aren’t peer reviewed in the same way as academic articles are pre-publication, but, like journalism, they are subject to the gaze of readers from around the world. What I think are important posts are sometimes barely read, whereas other posts have been read much more frequently. The most read posts each year are listed below:

2022 Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?

2021 Half of secondary ITT applicants in just 3 subjects

2020 Poverty is not destiny – OECD PISA Report

2019 How do you teach politics today?

2018 Applications to train as a teacher still far too low for comfort

2017 Coasting schools

2016 1% pay rise for most teachers likely in 2016

2015 Grim news on teacher training

2014 More on made not born: how teachers are created

2013 Has Michael Gove failed to learn the lessons of history?

The most read of these was the September 2020 post entitled ‘Poverty is not destiny’ that was read 1,544 times during that October and was read more than 1,600 times in all during the autumn of 2020.

Older posts can collect more ‘reads’ overall as new readers browse the back catalogue. Just before Christmas 2022, someone browsed the whole of the back catalogue, resulting in the highest monthly figures recorded for any single month since the blog started.

The genesis for the blog was the columns that I wrote for the then TES between the late 1990s and my retirement in 2011. I am lucky to have many of those columns in a presentation book created for my retirement.

This column has looked at numbers to do with education, mostly statistics, but also management information. Some of the latter has been provided by TeachVac, the job matching site I helped create and run some eight years ago.

There are a few other posts of which my, so far unsuccessful, campaign for a Jacob’s Law is the most important. This Law would ensure no child was left without a school place for longer than three weeks and is especially important for the many children taken into care. If we want to stop them becoming NEETs, we need to keep them in education not cast them aside because they might be a ‘bit of challenge’. Who would be a challenge if taken from home without any warning as a young person and moved to a different location away from friends and familiar locations and your school. (Search for Jacob for the various posts about this issue)

Please campaign to ensure a place for every child in a school. These young people are the education equivalent of the patients in A&E waiting on trolleys, but their wait can be six months, and just as life changing! Lt’s make 2023 the year the DfE tackled this issue.

Marking time between PMs

Posted on October 21, 2022 by John Howson

The current political turmoil at Westminster has led commentators and journalists to suggest that the Schools Bill is now effectively dead in the water. The Bill had been struggling ever since it was introduced into the House of Lords and then received a right mauling, such as Upper House can sometimes deliver. Even Tory members of the ‘revising chamber’ seemed unimpressed by their own government’s attempts at reform. The strongest support at that point in time seemed to come from the bench of the Lords Spiritual in the form of the Church of England Bishop with the speaking rights for their schools.

So, while the DfE also waits to see whether kit Malthouse joins the ranks of those passing through Sanctuary buildings or will be allowed to stay on in post as Secretary of State by the next prime minster, what might civil servants do with their time if the Bill has effectively been dropped?

Personally, I would like to see the regulations for in-year admissions updated to provide more power provided for local authorities, especially with regard to children in care and those with an EHCP that move into a new area. These are some of our most vulnerable children, and the present system of opt-out by academies for in-year admissions sometimes doesn’t help their education.

I have called this a need for a Jacob’s Law to change this situation, but in reality, it doesn’t need a law, just a change in regulations and secondary legislation.

For those that want to read the history behind the need for a Jacob’s Law, see Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com) It is now 5 years since Jacob returned to Oxfordshire and started his period of 22 months without a school accepting him on roll. We must not let this happen again.

The last two White Papers have both contained references to returning control of in-year admissions to local authorities and the government has confirmed that to do so doesn’t need primary legislation.

The loss of the Schools Bill also puts at risk the idea of a register of young people of school age. Such a list would allow movement of young people to be tracked and make it harder for children to disappear off the radar. Not impossible, because parents can take drastic action such as disappearing overseas, but at least it might help policymaker understand the extent of home schooling and encourage debate about the rights of children and their parents to education and what that term actually means in the modern age?

The 25-49 age group that contains most parents of school-age children was one of the groups least supportive of the Conservatives in the latest polling of the public, even putting the Party behind the Lib Dems nationally among this age-group! PeoplePolling / GB News Survey Results

Minister’s business experience useful?

Posted on September 8, 2022 by John Howson

Will schools in financial difficulties receive the Flybe treatment from Kelly Tolhurst MP, the new Minister of State for Education? In her career the Minister has served as a PUS – or first rank of the ministerial ladder – across three departments, plus a couple of months over this summer in the Whip’s Office, where she had previously served in a junior role in 2018. Kelly Tolhurst, MP for Rochester and Strood in Kent is possibly best remembered for being the Minister sent out explain the refusal to bail out the airline Flybe when it ran into turbulent financial conditions at the start of the covid pandemic.

“Unfortunately, in a competitive market, companies do fail, and it is not the role of Government to prop them up.

Given the time of year, the nature of Flybe’s business and fleet, and the routes that it flies, sufficient alternative transport arrangements should be available, either with other airlines or by road and rail.”

Hansard 5^th March 2020

Hopefully, the new minister will be more understanding about the financial position of schools as they wrestle with the present financial crisis. As her role at the in the Business Department involved responsibility for small businesses, the MP should be well aware of the challenges that schools will face. As a supporter of the free market, she may well want to see whether the Department is spending its cash wisely on issues such as teacher recruitment and SEND.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the constraints of a national Funding Formula that can be ignored when times are good may also need to be something to be considered, especially the differences between maintained schools and academies when it comes to shifting cash around.

As an MP for Rochester, Kelly Tohurst will know of the stark differences between the town’s schools, where some are comprehensives that are operating alongside selective schools, and will as a businesswomen understand both the costs of re-organising the system nationally to benefit the few rather than the many, and the links between the school system and the need for a modern skilled workforce, something some of her predecessors may have seemed less concerned about.

As in other areas with selective schools, private secondary schools are thin on the ground in the Rochester area of Medway Council and that should be a warning to any government thinking of expanding selective education. The cost to the state of parents switching from private education to state selective schooling should be enough to dissuade any government from taking our school system back to the nineteenth Century as means of creating a twenty first century growth economy.

The Secretary of State should be familiar with issues such as youth offending and the variations between different groups and their schooling. I would hope that this will be a serious consideration for the new residents of Sanctuary Buildings, perhaps more so than under recent inhabitants.

Finally, I would again make my please for Jacob’s Law, whereby children in care are guaranteed a school pace within 14 days of the State taking over parental responsibility. This needs the promised change in the administration of in-year admissions and would befit the education of these children often taken from their families with no say in the matter and dumped in a different part of the country.

A very small but important minority

Posted on August 15, 2022 by John Howson

The DfE have recently updated their study on ‘Education, children’s social care and offending, descriptive statistics’ with some 10 case studies of different local authorities. One of the case studies is of Haringey, the north London borough. Education, children’s social care and offending – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Regular readers of this blog will know why I have focused on this report. For new readers, I started my teaching career in a school in Tottenham that is part of the Borough of Haringey. For personal reasons this study also brings back memories of a particular incident in January 1977 that found me on the front page of The Daily Mirror.

Much of what is in the analysis will not surprise readers, and the authors go out of their way to remind everyone reading the report that a causal relationship cannot be inferred from any characteristic.

I do have a slight issue with the choice of offences listed. There are no driving offences, such as ‘death by dangerous or careless driving’ in the list, although in my view they involve violence. Perhaps, there weren’t any recorded offences in these categories. Maybe, the same reason will apply to ‘aggravated burglary’ that can include violence.

I would recommend this report or one of the others in the selection of the ten authorities to any new teacher. Indeed, much more focus should probably be placed on the teaching of challenging pupils during teacher preparation courses. Interestingly, the report doesn’t allocate points to characteristics and score the profile of a young person ‘at risk’. He is likely to be male; few females even these days commit offences in the categories included. He is likely to do better at maths than English: an interesting observation. For the rest, you can read the report and look at the graphs, although some data are so small as to be suppressed, as they might allow individuals to be identified.

For policymakers, and I include our next Prime Minister in that group, there has to be a consideration as to whether the focus on the subjects in the English Baccalaureate and a lack of resources for practical and vocational might have had cost implications for society. Those that successfully complete their education may well be less likely to commit acts of violence.

This blog has been championing a Jacob’s Law and has also supported the need for inter-agency working. I am not clear whether this report also considered children not yet in school because they had just moved into Haringey, and their offending behaviour.

What seems certain is that spending on those at the late stage of primary education and early secondary schooling may well be worthwhile. Indeed, ensuring every child, regardless of SEND needs, can read and write is something we ought to strive to achieve, so that no child starts secondary school regarded by the school as a failure.

The depressing fact is that such a statement could have been made at any time in the history of education. We know the problem, but have not been willing to create the solution.

Children in Care: the civil rights issue for our time

Posted on May 23, 2022 by John Howson

An important independent report on children in care was published today Final Report – The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (independent-review.uk) Those of you that have read my blog post about the need for a Jacob’s Law will find much to be encouraged by in the suggestions for change contained within this new report. Time for Jacob’s Law | John Howson (wordpress.com)

Sadly, there is also much to be concerned about as well. One outstanding section of the Executive Summary really resonated with me when I read it for the first time.

The disadvantage faced by the care experienced community should be the civil rights issue of our time. Children in care are powerless, are often invisible and they face some of the greatest inequalities that exist in England today. In spite of these injustices so many ‘care’ experienced people go on to run businesses, start families, earn doctorates, produce drama, write poetry, become government ministers and contribute to the world in countless ways

Five ambitious missions are needed so that care experienced people secure: loving relationships; quality education; a decent home; fulfilling work and good health as the foundations for a good life. Central government and local authorities, employers, the NHS, schools, colleges and universities must step up to secure these foundations for all care experienced people. This will require a wider range of organisations to act as corporate parents for looked after children, and the UK should be the first country in the world to recognise the care experience as a protected characteristic.

Executive-summary.pdf (independent-review.uk) Page 11

This afternoon, the House of Lords debates the Second Reading of the new Schools Bill, and I hope that a need for a Jacob’s Law, ensuring rapid admission to schools for children taken into care and required to move school, will receive at least a passing mention. Adding a Clause about in-year admissions and local authority requirements on academies to take such children would be a quick win for this group of what one might call ‘bin bag kids’. They earn that epithet because all too often they come home and find all their possessions in black bin bags in the bag of a social worker’s car. Just imagine how you would feel if that happened to you as a teenager?

Perhaps it is not surprising that a significant number of young people in our young Offenders Institutions have experienced a period in care. In the Inspection Report on Werrington YOI published recently 42 of the 91 young people survey had been in care at some point before receiving a custodial sentence or serving time on remand. Werrington-web-2020.pdf (justiceinspectorates.gov.uk)

Even though these are difficult economic times, some rebalancing of government priorities remains necessary, and both ensuring services are in place to prevent child neglect – often the most common reason for young children being taken into care – and creating better outcomes for those that are taken into care is a vital necessity as the report published today makes clear.

Every councillor with responsibility as a corporate parent should ask themselves the question: can my Council do more for these young people?

John Howson

Education and the numbers that affect what happens

Tag Archives: Jacob's Law