You may have seen that the house-hunting website Rightmove is asking for feedback on its "School Checker" functionality on another thread. They are using data sourced from 192.com which calculates whether houses are within the "successful admissions area" of schools that use pure distance criteria. (Their algorithm doesn't cover other types of criteria).
However, for my Local Authority, they are using cut-off distances from National Offer Day, rather than the final cut-off distances from the start of term on September 1st. I know for a fact that the cut-off distances increase significantly between March/April and September because our LA has a high rate of families going private, meaning that waiting lists move a lot. That means schools' "successful admissions areas" are bigger than the ones shown on their website.
Does it matter? Yes, if people are making house-move and other big life-changing decisions based on this data. And yes, if it's affecting people's house prices (we're selling at the moment and my agent told me they lost a sale recently because a buyer 'discovered' a house was outside of a school's admissions area - in fact it was right on the edge and they would have easily got a place at the school).
I'd be interested to know whether the cut-off distances are meaningful for other areas. I guess in areas where waiting lists don't move much it might be less of a problem. Here is a link so you can check it out: www.192.com/schools/
Unfortunately, Rightmove don't seem to be asking for feedback on whether their data is accurate - they just want to hear from pre-school parents as to whether it would influence their house-buying behaviour.
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Education
Websites 'calculating' admissions areas and getting it seriously wrong!!!
kyususpecs · 17/04/2017 22:51
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