Parent appeals: Your stories

Legal firms reported families paying up to �2,000 to get help with an appeal

A growing number of parents in England and Wales are paying for legal advice to get children into their preferred state school, the BBC has learned.

Nearly all the legal firms contacted by the BBC said they had been inundated with requests for admissions appeal advice in recent months.

The BBC News website has been contacted by parents who have shared their experiences of going through the appeals process:

The only other option for us is private school, so legal advice may be cheaper in the long run

I have a four-year-old daughter. We appealed in November last year and only got a reply a week ago. We had been refused for all the preferred schools we had chosen. As school is starting next week, we are frustrated.

The allocated school is two miles away from home with steep hills. We cannot take our child to school and my mother does. She is too old to walk and then take two buses.

We will appeal again since we found out the local authority made a number of mistakes and provided wrong information in terms of school numbers. We will put our daughter in a private school until we get a reply.

This time, we are seeking legal advice. We didn't on the first time as we thought the process was going to be fair, but we have realised that this is all brand new for us and we are not sure what parts of the process we can challenge, which makes the whole process even more difficult for parents.

The only other option for us is private school, so legal advice may be cheaper in the long run.

We are not an affluent family; we both work in public service, and have lived in this area all our lives; we have not moved into this area just to get a good school.

I don't see how a solicitor would have been able to help at all. We didn't need one.

Our son was rejected a place at our local infants school and we were told we would need to travel two miles to the next available school. My wife doesn't drive, so she would have to walk back and forth with our other baby in her arms.

We went to the appeals tribunal representing ourselves. We won the appeal. It all seemed like common sense to me at the time, and the appeals panel are fair and ultimately I felt, on the side of the parents.

We appealed on grounds of class size, as we were told the maximum was fixed at 28 children but then found out one of the classes had 29 children.

I don't see how a solicitor would have been able to help at all. We didn't need one. Nonetheless, it wasn't a pleasant experience at all.

I have a 13-year-old daughter and appealed back in January for an alternative as the school she was allocated is far from home.

To get there, she has to cross the motorway and take the bus. I am afraid to send her on her own and can't go with her because of work. My daughter has only been living here for a year.

My two appeals were rejected and I cannot afford to pay a solicitor. I don't know what to do now, does this mean that I will have to wait forever?

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