Can a school rescind an offered (and accepted) nursery place?

[devsdev]

Hi all,

My daughter is due to join nursery at a local school in January (she's October born, was offered a place to start in September, school realised in July they wouldn't get funding and then delayed her start to January). I spoke to someone at the school this evening to enquire about the teacher home visit and was told the school is trying to fill some yr 1/yr 2 places (which are apparently "mandatory" to be filled?) and will have to provide a nursery place to the family as well. The implication being that my child will have her space taken away.

Lewisham Council was shut by the time I got off the phone so I couldn't speak with anyone yet, but are they allowed to take away the space? This is the closest school to us and I would hope she gets in for Reception as well as its our closest school. She would also hopefully be in nursery for 5 terms since she isn't due to start school till September 2017 (I was planning on asking today if we should reapply for September right now but got derailed by the other information). We turned down 2 other offers once we accepted this one so it feels abundantly unfair that she could lose her space - she is so excited!

Does anyone have any experience with this or any advice?

Thank you so much!

[devsdev]

Anyone?

[Otta]

Is it a state school or an academy / free school? If the latter, then they can basically do what they want.

[Ellie78]

I'm confused - if you're talking about a nursery place then I don't think you can do much if you haven't signed a contract. I don't think Lewisham has any input here?

[newtoedf]

Schools usually manage their own admissions for nursery which makes it all a lot messier than reception places. If the school generally have 2 intakes a year for nursery then you should take precedence over what is presumably a late applicant since the priority for siblings would normally only apply to applications received by the closing date. However, if they don't normally have a January intake but had a vacant place and were prepared to let you have it, then it is all much trickier but they should stand by their offer (if it was a formal written one). Hope you get it sorted but if it turns out that they offered a place to you when your child was too young then deferred the place then rescinded the offer, I'd be questioning whether that was really a place you wanted to send your child!

[devsdev]

Thank you all for the responses. I was feeling quite conflicted about the school because I did feel like we were getting the run around - but I went in and they have resolved everything and been very apologetic. Turns out nursery is not governed by local authority admissions since all schools (state included) run their own nursery intakes though they get LA funding for the spaces. If they hadn't resolved it then my only recourse would have been to argue that they purportedly use LA admissions criteria for nursery spaces too and per that criteria you cannot rescind an accepted offer after 7 days (or 7 working days) as far as I understand. Anyway - crisis averted. Though she will still be the only kid starting middle of the school year. Kids are resilient, right?

[Otta]

Yes they are. And she'll be new and interesting to the other kis, so sure they'll all be keen to talk to her.

[newtoedf]

She'll be the new kid for the first week but after that she'll just be one of the class. In fact since 2.5 weeks over christmas will feel like a lifetime to a 3 or 4 year old, they might not even notice she wasn't always there!