YOUR child has been condemned to educational subnormality and a career washing wheelie bins by being denied their first-choice primary. How should you freak out?
Wail and moan
When a four-year-old’s future has been torn away, no reaction is too histronic. Roll on the floor weeping. Drive your Kia Sportage into a tree. Consider self-immolation on the steps of the council offices. This is state-sanctioned murder. Ignore your child’s attempts to calm you. They don’t know.
Lodge an appeal
Fill in the form and send it off, yes. But then hire a barrister – preferably a KC, is Cherie Blair available? – for the hearing before an independent admissions panel. Threaten legal action against the council, the school, the admissions panel, the Department of Education and parents of children who did get a place. Nuclear is the only way to go.
Write to your MP
The letter is only the start. Demand an in-person meeting, visit their office in Westminster, turn up without warning outside their home waving placards. Protesters against the war in Gaza do, and this is far more important. Don’t rule out glueing yourselves to their car and your child to the windscreen.
Get the local paper involved
A photo of yourselves and your child looking heartbroken outside your chosen school, heartrending invented stories of bullying, a tear-stained teddy bear; it all adds up. School governors still read it, because by definition they’re busybodies with nothing better to do.
Use medical grounds
Get a doctor on board. Private, obviously. Run your four-year-old through a battery of test to firmly establish their myriad shortfalls and complex needs. Really drive home to the kid that without specialist help there is no hope for them. Your chosen school can provide such help. What luck.
Consider this a warm-up
The correct primary school has been secured. You can relax for the next six months or so, until they begin their first term and you begin worrying about getting them into your first choice of secondary school. Have you considered a compulsory purchase order for their sports field, then building a house on it? Because that’s definitively in f**king catchment.
