Catchment areas

[Curlygirl06]

My daughter and I were talking about school admissions and catchment areas. She's a teacher, and it's always been the case whilst she's been teaching that catchment areas are one of the main criteria.
However, I'm sure that some years ago, catchment area criteria was not used, leading to children living near to their local school ending up miles away, whilst a child from miles away got a place at the same local school, for example. There were no other reasons like sibling attendee, special needs etc, just the luck of the draw.
When mine went to school it went first on catchment but was there a period when it was a bit of a free for all? My friend who has children the same age remembers the same but my daughter and hers, who is a nursery supervisor, insist that that never happened. Am I gong mad in my old age?

It depends very much on the local area.

Some areas still have catchments - this is often where schools are geographically close together, with a large area close to no schools.

Some areas have ‘priority admissions areas’ - no guarantee that you will get in if you live in theses, but a higher chance than if you live outside them.

Sone areas are strictly distance based.

Within these overall ‘systems’, there are then other school-specific arrangements: faith is the most common, but academies have added a wide variety of options too.

LA schools tend to all have the same ‘system’, whatever it is. Other schools, as long as they publish arrangements that do not break admissions law within the legally-required timescales, can have different ones and change them quite regularly.

A recent change, for example, in the current teacher shortage, is to add a priority for the children of staff who have worked in the school for a particular period. The arrangements for siblings vary between schools etc etc.

Thank you. We're in Wiltshire if that's any help.
However I'm sure I remembered that catchment area was definitely not considered as a first option, leading to a hell of a lot of anomalies with children living next to their local school having to go to one miles away.

There are some secondaries which allocate places based on lottery so distance doesn’t matter.

There was a period - a long time ago now - when schools could prioritise applicants who put them first choice. So if you lived next to a school but put them second, someone from miles away who put them first could get priority. Might that be what you remember?

A catchment is a priority admissions area

The criteria will be (after LAC) something like 1) siblings in catchment 2) other catchment 3) other siblings 4) all others

Much of the country doesn't have them. There are however an increasing number of London schools introducing them, so that schools have local pupils, not lots of siblings from families who moved away after getting the eldest in, leaving more local families travelling further for places (bad for congestion, the environment and communities)

Living within the catchment may not however be enough, if there are more DC in it than places available. In that case, it's normally by distance in the tiebreak category. The admissions footprint can be smaller than the catchment (or, to use the slightly confusing terminology sometimes seen, the effective catchment can be smaller than the catchment)

It's entirely up to the admissions authority (LA, academy, VA school) to decide which of the permitted criteria they use to rank their applicants. So parents do need to look at what each school has published (and if there is a catchment there should be a map or a detailed description) so parents can work out where they stand.

Schools and LAs usually publish the "greatest distance admitted" figures, so you have a shot at working out whether you would have had an offer in previous years but as (unlike catchment, which is fixed and can only be changed after public consultation) the admissions footprint can change a lot between years.

Could be, as I said it's a while since my children were in school. My daughter has been a teacher for 10 years so it would be before that time.
I don't have any children of an age that I need school places for, but this is really bugging me!

I'm sure I read on here cases where people had siblings at the local school, put that down as first choice for subsequent children but were given a place miles away, whilst non catchment area children with no sibling criteria etc were given a place at said school. Is it my age, lol?

Some schools locally had feeder schools. Children attending a feeder school were higher up the admissions criteria list than catchment. Some of the feeders were small rural village schools, which were never oversubscribed. So if you were willing to travel to the feeder you could get your child into the massively oversubscribed upper school despite being miles away out of catchment,

I Don’t know how long a child needed to attend the feeder school. I presume they just had to be there where they applied for the middle/upper, so could have just done one year.