Refusal of dependant visa

[cooperman123]

Can someone help. In August my Colombian wife and I applied for a visa for my 17 year old step daughter who currently lives with her father(my ex wife's partner) in Colombia. He provides a home for her and my wife sends money each month to help with her daughter's living expenses which she was required to do under a court order.
When my wife came here in July leaving her daughter behind, we wasnt in a position to apply for her daughter to come here. Her daughter was still 16 and on her final year of school. She graduated in December 2013 and thats when we started looking into the possibility of applying for her to come here on a settlement visa.

My wife has sole responsibility for her daughter but it took about 6 months to get the custody through with all the bureacracy involved. The ex partner agreed to allow her to have full custody and it was granted in August. We could not apply for the visa until that was granted.

The Embassy have refused the visa on the grounds that "when assessing sole responsibility entry clearance guidance states a sponsoring parent must be able to show that he/she has been solely responsible for exercising parental care over the child for a substantial period, If the sponsoring parent and child are separated the child will normally be expected to have been given the care of the sponsoring parent's relatives rather than the other parent. An application should normally be refused if the child has been in the care of the other parents relatives...."

They have said that we have not showed "serious and compelling family or other reasons".

We couldnt apply for her daughter to come before now because my wife never had full custody and needed to get full custody. The embassy know that. The reasons why we want her daughter to come here is to have a family life with us. My wife and her daughter have a much stronger relationship than that with the daughters father. But other than a statement I find it hard to prove any of this.

So where do we go from here? Do we have grounds to appeal? If so what are they? If not do we give up trying to get her here meaning my wife and her daughter forever live apart? or do we try again with a new visa.

These are the only reason for refusal. Everything else they were fine with

Any advice good or bad will be helpful
Thanks
Graham Cooper