AIBU to ask something about secondary school admission/SIF?

[Turmericpie]

I had a discussion about this with someone (we are a way off secondary admissions) and neither of us knew.

Do regular (non faith) secondaries take your ethnicity/religious background into consideration when sorting through oversubscribed places? I am an ethnic minority - in a predominantly white area - would it make a difference to the DC being considered a place?

No, they don't.

Check the criteria for your school on their website, but I've never seen a preference like that.

Not IME.

No.

They can only follow their published admission arrangements, which have to comply with the Admissions Code.

They must not use subjective criteria - even for faith schools, they must not take into account views on your suitability, but only use demonstrable things which are open to anyone - such as membership of the religion, being on the parish roll if specific church named (you do not have to live in the parish to join in this way), and frequency of attendance.

For non faith schools, typical criteria (after SEN, which are pretty much separate to main admissions; and LAC, former LAC who must be given priority) include catchment priority, siblings, teacher's DC, and tie-break distance from school. Or it could for a few schools be a lottery. There might also be some selective places, or feeder school priority, or fair-banding.

Schools do not have to use all the legally possible criteria, but they may not use any others. Having non-compliant admissions policies is exceptionally rare (though mistakes could I suppose happen), not least as it is a grounds for successful appeal by those who would have got a place if the arrangements had complied.

It's all done by computer these days, sorting and prioritising by the published criteria. There's no-one reading applications and deciding who fits

Thanks so much. Such a thorough and helpful explanation.

What does tiebreak distance mean?

It means that when they reach the criterion where the number of applicants exceeds the number of places still available, they have to use a tie-breaker between those in that category.

So say that after all SEN, LAC and priority catchment applicants have places, there are 20 places still to be filled, but there are 70 in the remaining 'all other applicant' criteria. They have to publish as part of the arrangements which 20 of the oversubscribed criterion get an offer. The far and away most common way of doing this is by distance to school gates, with the closest applicants getting in.

Tiebreak distance means that if there are applications all equal on other criteria they will decide who gets the places by distance from home to the school. The council has their own way of measuring distance, eg using safe walking routes etc.