Admissions criteria

[dolphin13]

Can anyone help me please. The school we would like ds to go to isn't in our catchment area.

Once all the children who have priority for this school have a place what happens with the rest?.

Suppose there are 20 children on the list and 10 places how does the school decide which child gets a place?.

As far as I know they still apply the criteria to the waiting list. So in our LEA, it would still be

1 SN/SEN with statments naming school

2 Looked after children/Social care

3 Siblings

1. Distance from school.

Usually in our school it gets down to the distance criteria, so on the waiting list if someone moves into area closer to school than you, you drop down the list. Likewise if someone moves into the area and the elder sibling gets a place, then the younger sibling would be placed higher on the list inder siblings, ahead of those on the distance criteria, iyswim?

hth

The school will have an admission policy which dictates what happens. There isn't usually a common policy on this as it depends on whether it is a faith school etc. Typically for a primary school the order of priority will be looked after children, children with a statement of SN naming that school, siblings of children at the school and then distance from the school. But sometimes siblings are limited to say siblings in catchment area, sometimes there are faith criteria etc.

You need to read the admission criteria for this school. They will be on the local authority's website. If it is an LA school (not an academy, faith school or similar), it is likely that it will have the same admission criteria as all the other LA schools in the area. The admission criteria will explain exactly how places are allocated.

Basically, the children are placed in categories with looked after children always coming first (SN children with statements naming the school are dealt with separately so shouldn't be mentioned in the admission criteria). If any category has more people in it than there are places remaining there will be a tiebreaker of some kind. This is usually distance from the school (although different local authorities take different approaches to measuring distance) but some authorities use a random draw.