Can someone explain to me how the LEA primary school allocations actually work? What does the LEA do??? Does any actually know?

[MummyTheGregor]

I should probably not worry because Ds is in our second choice school and we're happy about it but am I ever going to understand?? I think I just want to work out why we didnt get our first choice..... it seems that this year in our area there's a particularly high intake for the September starters......

Am on several fb groups for local mums and there seems to have been lots disappointed parents and much talk of appeals etc....... most confusing thing is that lots (about 10 that I heard of) of parents from my area have not got any of their choices but have been allocated a school that approx 4 miles away which they've been told is the only one that has places - whether these people only put one choice down I don't know but really doesnt seem to make sense why they would be given a place so far away.

Also we got our second choice school which is out of catchment but .49 miles away, (our first choice was 1.29 miles away).... someone I know had our 2nd choice school down as their first (and only) choice live 1.4 miles away but been allocated the school 4 miles away, how come we get in even tho its our second choice...?

Someone else I've heard didn't get in to our first choice school listed as their first choice too, I think they're about 1.5 miles away but offered their 5th choice school which is 2 miles away........yet someone who has our first choice but listed it as their 3rd got offered our first choice school (they live approx 0.5 miles away)...... how is that possible does distance from school trump preferences completely? Do the preferences go out of the window in a high intake year??

An another thing confusing me is that we've been told that sibings in a school is matter-less in our LEA but that cant be the case as my neighbours child did get in our first choice and they have siblngs in situ already so sibbling must (and rightly imo) have a bearing......... but theres another instance that I've heard of at a school we didnt apply to where one family got a place with a sibling in situ, another didnt but the family that didnt lives closer than the family that did get a place............

all of these instances seem to contradict each other....

any experts able to shed any light on the process (or understand any of my ramblings???)... tia

[meditrina]

Yes, distance from school is often the key thing; it does all come down whether you fit the published criteria better than other applicants.

Parental preference counts only if you qualify for more than one of the school you list, and then you are offered the one you give the highest preference to.

[RueDeWakening]

It doesn't matter what order you list the schools in, the schools don't know whether you've put them first or last. The computer goes through and works out which schools you are eligible for a place at, and if it's more than one, allocates you a place at the one you put highest on your list - in your case the second.

If you don't qualify for any of the schools you have listed, then the computer will allocate you the closest school with places still available once all parent preferences have been dealt with.

The admission criteria for each school should be available either on the school's own website or on the council website, or in the "starting school" booklet that you may have got hold of last autumn. This will tell you whether the school(s) gives any priority to siblings or not.

Hope that clarifies things a bit!

[prh47bridge]

Just to emphasise what has already been said...

The order in which you put your preferences makes no difference to your chances of getting in to a particular school. It is illegal for a school to prioritise people who name it as their first choice. So someone who lives next to a school but names it as sixth choice will be admitted ahead of someone in the same admissions category who names it as first choice but lives 2 miles away.

The order of your preferences only come into play if you qualify for offers from more than one of the schools you chose. You will then only receive the offer from the higher preference school. So if you qualify for offers from your 2nd and 4th choices you will be offered your 2nd choice.

As for why some parents have ended up with a school 4 miles away, I'm afraid that can happen if you don't get any of your preferences. The LA will offer you the nearest school with places available. That will be an unpopular school and can be miles from home.

[MangoDaiquiri]

Your preference order only matters to you. Not to the LEA. Applicants for each school all go into a pool without the preference order number and are then ranked according to admissions criteria, which may be something like 1. looked after children, 2. children with a statement of special needs naming the school, 3. siblings, 4. distance from the gate as the crow flies etc etc. Admissions criteria can be different for different schools. I applied to six schools and between them there were five different sets of admissions criteria! You then get allocated the school which you qualify for which is your highest preference.
Simply, your friend lives 1.4 miles from the school you got, she lives further than you so was less likely to get a place. She ranked lower than you did. The fact that she had it as a higher preference is irrelevant.
Regarding the siblings, again different schools have different criteria. Some schools admit all siblings above others ranked on distance. Some have defined catchment areas and admit siblings in catchment, then other children in catchment, then siblings out of catchment. Some church schools admit siblings fulfilling faith criteria, others fulfilling faith criteria, siblings not fulfilling faith criteria. Some don't count year 6 pupils as an older sibling, since they will no longer be there when the child starts. It's all about the admissions criteria of the school in question basically.

[X3512]

Agree with all the above, also,I would find it extremely unusual for siblings to be no higher up the published admissns criteria in ANY school in your LA.
Some schools do and some don't give preference to siblings which sounds like the case in your op. You can check this by looking at the admissions policy on the school websites.

If you need any further advice there are plenty of knowledgable people on the primary forum (prh being one of them).

[X3512]

Oops! I was in chat, didn't realise I had drifted over to primary!

[OeufsWillBeOeufs]

Preference order used to make a difference in some areas - so if you didn't put a school first you had less chance of getting in even if you lived on the doorstep - and it only stopped making a difference six or seven years ago, so you may find some people still thinking and talking about it as if it does.

Thank god they got rid of that, as it wasn't a fair system - it meant that you could only express a preference for a particular school first if you had a rock-solid backup, as if you failed (if you were gambling on a very low birth rate year getting your child a place, but they still didn't) you would then go to the bottom of the list for all the other schools you'd put down, like your catchment school - effectively punishing you for having dared to ask for a different place first.

It was perfect for people with faith or private schools as a backup - they could risk making their first choice their real preferred school, knowing that if they didn't get it they had alternatives to fall back on, i.e. schools that would put them at the top of the list on faith or money grounds and not care about preference order. Not so good for everyone else though.

[lougle]

It does sound confusing but it's actually very simple.
Take school a:
Computer ranks each child whose application form lists them, in order of how closely they meet the criteria, regardless of how high that school is in the applicant's preference.

If school a had 127 children who applied for a place there (whether in first, last or any other preference), they would be listed 1-127. Tie breaker is almost always distance within any one category, so all other things being equal, the closest child is higher on the list.

If all 127 children put school a as first choice and the PAN (published admission number) is 30, numbers 1-30 get offered a place.

If numbers 3, 7, 12, 18, 20 and 23 had also applied for school b and had listed school b higher on their form and school b had places for them, they would be struck of the list for school a and offered school b.

That would leave 6 empty places, so numbers 31-36 would then be offered school a (presuming its their highest available school).

Eventually, every school has on its list either the maximum number of children it can take for whom it was the highest listed available school, or the maximum number allocated with some spaces remaining.

[admission]

The thing that you need to understand is that for all of the schools you expressed a preference for, the admission authority for the school will draw a list up of all the applicants in order using the admission criteria of the school in question. The LA then does all the number crunching to come up with the school that can be offered to you.
The system is called the equal preference system,so what happens is that the LA looks at the school you put top of your preferences and if say they can admit 30 pupils they allocate those places on the basis of the admission criteria order. As lougle says some of the pupils that are in the top 30 may actually have only put the school down as their third priority and been able to be given a place at the other more preferred school. This is why you cannot assume that the top 30 in the admission criteria order will actually be allocated the place.
In your situation you were not offered a place at your first preference. My best guess would be that the reason is that you live too far away from the school, 1.29 miles away and that there were more than enough pupils who lived closer than you.
When it comes to your second priority you live reasonably close and therefore were within the 30 who could be offered a place. Your friend who only put down the 2nd preference school and lived 1.40 miles away again was probably too far away to be given a place. The fact that it was their one and only preference was irrelevant because whether it was there 1st or 3rd preference is not anything to do with how the places are put into the allocation order. The only time whether you put it down as 1st or 2nd preference comes into play is if the LA could offer you a place at both schools at which point they will allocate the one you preferred most.

[MummyTheGregor]

Thanks for all the clarification, really appreciate it..... I'm surprised why it's bothered me so much as I absolutely loved our second choice school too, and am not disappointed but I think I like to understand the logic behind the decision, but just couldn't till the MN geniuses explained it all!

How about appeals? We're not going to appeal, but If someone is going to appeal what exactly is the difference if someone isnt eligible for the school at the time of allocation why would an appeal help? - what grounds make someone win an appeal? If my friend that have been allocated the school 4 miles away appeals to be allocated yhey marked at first choice, the school that we got into they still live 1.4 miles away appealing doesn't change that, are additional grounds considered or is it essentially a bit of a waste of time?

[ProudAS]

Appealing is an appeal against the decision not to offer the child a place at a specific school.

Appealing won't usually make a difference if it's ICS. The only way in which an ICS appeal can be upheld is if either the decision was so unreasonable as to be perverse or you were turned down as a result of the criteria not being applied correctly (e.g. LA failing to take account of sibling).

When it's not an ICS appeal the panel weigh up the prejudice to the school of admitting another pupil against the prejudice to the pupil of not being admitted.

Dare say one of our experts will be on shortly to clarify more.

[PanelChair]

It's exactly as ProudAS says.

An appeal isn't (or shouldn't be) simply a second look at the original application. And to stand any chance of success, it has to amount to more than "But we really, really like this school and want our child to have a place".

At an infant class size appeal, all the panel can do is check to ensure that the admissions criteria comply with the law and have been correctly applied and that the decision to refuse a place is not unreasonable (in the legal sense of being perverse).

At other appeals, the arguments can go wider, looking at any needs that the child has - educational, social, medical, pastoral etc - that can only be met by attending that particular school. The panel weighs up the prejudice to the child in not bring admitted against the prejudice to the school and the pupils already in it in having to cope with another pupil. Even then, it is about identifying particular needs, not just a wish or a preference for that school over the one that's been allocated.

[RunAwayHome]

Where I live (at least, unless someone has since taking this up with the ombudsman, as was suggested when I mentioned this here last year), the order of preference does make a (minor) difference.

The first few admissions criteria are as typically found: children in care; catchment with sibling; catchment without sibling; out-of-catchment with sibling.

But, unusually, at that point there is another category: children who have been unable to gain a place at their catchment school because of over-subscription.

Only after this does the final category - out-of-catchment with no sibling, distance used as a tie-breaker - come into play.

I appreciate that this is a very unlikely scenario, since most of the schools are filled with siblings and with catchment children already, but it does suggest that someone who wanted a particular school but was out of catchment for it would stand a better chance of getting it if they had put their own catchment school first and that catchment school was a very popular one that had a lot of siblings.

In practice, it probably wouldn't happen, because it would mean being in catchment for an extremely popular school, and yet instead wanting a different school that was not so popular that it was filled with catchment children, but popular enough that not all the out-of-catchment children got in. But theoretically, you'd stand a better chance of getting into school B as an out-of-catchment applicant if you put oversubscribed catchment school A down first, hoping that you wouldn't get in.

(This never affected me personally, just something I was looking into when trying to help a friends choose a school in previous years - she didn't want her popular catchment school as she didn't like the feel there, and we were trying to work out what chance she had of going elsewhere. In the end, I don't think this would have helped her as she was close enough that she probably would have got into the catchment school.)

[prh47bridge]

There is a specific prohibition in the Admissions Code against giving extra priority to parents ranking schools in a particular order. It isn't limited to saying you can't give priority for school A to parents naming it as first choice. You also can't give priority for school B based on parents naming school A as first choice. So it would only be legal if you got priority for other schools based on failing to get a place at your catchment school regardless of where your catchment school is in your list of priorities. In your scenario it should make no difference if you put catchment school A as first choice or last choice - you should still get priority for school B if you don't get in to school A. Anything else would be a breach of the Admissions Code in my view.

[RunAwayHome]

That's an interesting take on it; I wonder if putting it last would then count as 'not getting into your catchment school based on over-subscription', if in fact you would have got in if you put it earlier, because you are in catchment. And also how the whole computer system thing would work when the category you are in for one school depends on previous results of not getting into another - seems like a recipe for endless loops that could lead to all kinds of difficulty!

But I suppose it's all a bit of a moot point really, as the circumstances that it would happen in are fairly unlikely as I think most people do get into their catchment schools if they put them down (especially as some catchments now seem to have two schools, bizarrely), but I could perhaps see it happening if you lived near the edge of a very desirable one in a year with many siblings or new builds nearby etc. Still, I find it a rather interesting situation after reading all the appeals threads here, wondering how someone would get on with trying to argue that the admission arrangements were in fact unsuitable. I'd just like to understand it from the point of view of intellectual curiosity rather than practical necessity.

[Mepmep]

Watching with interest!

Can someone also explain the relationship between a school's catchment area and distance from school? For example, I saw a house for sale 0.5 miles from School A. However, School A doesn't list this street as being in their catchment area.

Sorry op, don't mean to hijack the thread but it seems a lot of knowledgeable folks have some very good answers, so I thought I'd ask!

I am also new to this - DS is only 5 months but am researching for the future!

[RunAwayHome]

yes I can see how those examples would form a case.

I meant in the specific examples of this admissions authority, whether someone would be able to successfully complain they were flawed. But you'd have to wait for a very specific combination of circumstances to occur before it would make a difference to a child getting a place. It just intrigues me as a point of argument!

[RunAwayHome]

Mepmep, I think that very much depends on your area. Many areas don't have defined catchments, but go on distance to the school.

Other areas (like mine) do have catchments defined as particular streets, set out in the admissions booklet. A few streets say that they are in the catchment for a group of federated schools or for a couple of schools. Faith school are also included in the catchment lists, but have additional criteria.

(actually, considering that, maybe my example above of not getting into your catchment school isn't quite so unlikely after all, if you weren't religious and loads of other people were, and it was a small PAN - some only 15 - and a lot of siblings, new builds, etc.. So in that case, perhaps you would have priority for an out-of-catchment school over the other out-of-catchment people, hinging on this question of whether you needed to put your catchment down first or not).

[RunAwayHome]

No, I meant the specific admission criteria that I mentioned above - giving priority to out-of-catchment children who didn't get into the catchment school because of over-subscription over children who are purely out-of-catchment and ranked on distance. I was thinking that you could have a scenario of two families both out of catchment, both wanting School B. One of the families, who, say, happened to live a long way from their catchment school or who were not religious and might therefore be on the borderline of getting in, could improve their chances for School B by making sure they put their catchment school down, hoping that they wouldn't get into it, thereby having priority for School B that they really wanted. (Convoluted, I know. But I could see how someone might argue that it was a potentially unfair admissions arrangement, because it appears to rely on not getting in to one school as part of determining whether they get into another, which sounds like it should be very hard to implement using computer programmes that work on equal preference and treat each school independently).

[Mepmep]

Oh my! This is so complicated! So how do all those lucky parents manage to buy a house in the catchment area of a good school? They must spend ages researching. Having said that, I noticed that our city has lots of areas where there is one outstanding school and a number of 'satisfactory' schools. It all seems like such a gamble - not looking forward to this process at all!