School admissions - check out Mumsnet local

[RebeccaMumsnet]

Hi all,

It's the time of year when those of us with DC due to start primary, junior or secondary next September have to make the tricky decision on which school to send them to.

We've teamed up with Schoolguide.co.uk to provide listings on Mumsnet Local for all the schools in your area - complete with links to Ofsted reports, maps and pupil/teacher ratios.

To take a look at the schools near you, go to your local site, click on Childcare & Education in the green navbar and select the sort of school you're looking for - alternatively, enter the name of the school you're interested in into the quick search on your Local homepage.

Please do go and have a look, and pay it forward by adding reviews of your DCs' schools to help others with the mind-boggling decision.

@LilithTheKitty

There doesn't seem to be a local site that covers the Wirral?

Hi Lillith,

Your closest site is Liverpool.
Please do have a look around and if there is info missing near you, do let us know.

@ElizabethMedora

Where is the information supposed to be? I can't see any school listings on my local site

Hi Elizabeth,

If you PM me with your local site name, I can help you navigate.
Is there nothing under the Childcare & Education header for your site?

Hi all,

We have heard back from Schools Guide who say:

"We pride ourselves on the accuracy of our data - data is what we do and its relevance is critical. We currently update the site every six weeks with Ofsted reports and Department for Education additions. Nowhere should there be issues raised that are described as "woefully out of date."

"We do have to wait for publicly available verified data from the DfE and Independent Schools Council (it's released in January each year for the previous summer's results; so we are waiting for 2014 data to be release in January 2015) and that may be where the perception may come from that we may be lagging behind. But if there data is publicly available, we have it."

We are sending over some case studies from this thread and emails we have had in to see if we can figure out where the issue stems from. Hopefully we will have this sorted soon.

Apologies to those who have tried and not found the information or have found incorrect information, please do keep posting as this helps us to build up a picture of where the issues are and helps us to resolve them.

Many thanks again all.

Goodness. Are they in training as politicians or something?

My perception is that there is a school here. I can, indeed, perceive it right now. Publicly, in fact. It's not included in their data.

Exactly Kittie, I went on a school tour of a school yesterday which must have been a figment of my imagination.

Hi both,

Would you mind emailing [email protected] with the name of the school and your local area for my attention please and I will see what is happening here.

Thanks so much for your help.

I find this website much better:

home.rm.com/schoolfinder/

Blimey. They might just as well have written "We are right. You are wrong. So there." Dreadful reply! And the pedant in me is cringing at the "there" in the last sentence....

What a load rubbish that reply was!
My two local schools have been here since before I was born 40+ years ago! They are not on the site; looked at local listings and map.

The school that I attended as a child and my son now goes to, that I can also see from my window isn't on there. Are they perchance lagging behind to 1938?

School’s quality does not affect gaps in attainment, research shows
www.theguardian.com/education/2014/sep/23/school-quality-gap-attainment-research

Choosing a secondary school: a teacher's guide for parents
www.theguardian.com/education/2014/sep/23/choosing-secondary-school-teachers-guide-for-parents

Even excellent schools ‘don’t help poor kids to catch rich’
www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/even-excellent-schools-dont-help-poor-kids-to-catch-rich-9749502.html

The school guide website has outdated information for my daughter's school which had a fantastic ofsted inspection ladt June but the website links to a report from 2012.

SO much better for me thanks Verap. We border five London boroughs so to be able to search by postcode is a godsend.

The information is completely out of date and inaccurate. It should not be relied upon.

My local site pertains to the town I live in. There are 12 secondary schools in the town (or just outside). The guide finds 53. Even allowing for the fact that parents may consider private schools further afield, that's about 30 schools that just don't belong here!

We are looking round our 3 locals schools, but have no idea why our catchment school is a 20 min bus ride, but a local school is 20 min walk. Must be Norfolk style!?

Presumably it's a work in progress?

MNHQ, I think you should take this down.

There is accurate information widely available elsewhere, for example here schoolsfinder.direct.gov.uk/. and here dashboard.ofsted.gov.uk/ and here www.education.gov.uk/schools/performance/.

People could be misled by the GSG "information", especially at this time of year.

Why not provide: links to the official data sources, so people always go to the most up-to-date, accurate information; a brief guide about what some of the elements mean, written by someone who really knows their stuff; and a space for discussion? Rather than let the GSG mangle the data and publish it late on MN?

I've just looked at Southwark, as an example. The listing includes a wellbeing programme that is run in schools and colleges, Greenacre school (Surrey), and several schools in Tower Hamlets (for example local.mumsnet.com/southwark/secondary-schools/213250-jamiatul-ummah-school and local.mumsnet.com/southwark/secondary-schools/213251-madani-secondary-girls-school). That's on a very quick glance.

The school list for Belfast gives a list of what I'm sure is every primary school in Northern Ireland which is a bit shit. There is also no information available for any of the schools I clicked on.

I already have all the information I need available to me locally, so was really just being nosey, but it would still have been nice for a little bit more to have been taken with it.

Hello,

Thank you very much for flagging up specifics it's really helpful to us to be able to diagnose problems. We're always testing and improving so really appreciate everyone who takes the time to helps us with that.

We've checked our data feed and that all seems to be running as it should so we're also looking into other possibilities.

School Guide are also checking their end. They get their info direct from DfE and OFSTED published sources so it should be as accurate as possible. Please do continue to let us know if there's a specific school that seems wrong and we'll investigate on a case by case basis.

A couple of people have mentioned 'missing schools' or schools that shouldn't be in a certain area.

Each local area in Mumsnet Local is defined by a series of postcodes. It's quite a challenge to get all those postcodes right so if there is an area that looks wrong please let us know and we'll check what postcodes are being included or excluded.

We do hope this to be a valuable source of information not only for an overview of the data but also crucially for Mumsnetters to share reviews. It's the chance to see what other Mumsnetters think about a school that we hope will make it different and useful.

I don't get how this is meant to be useful (having found it!). It lists 317 schools for my area. I am actually only in catchment for 4 schools.

Hi ElizabethMedora it sounds like your area could have the wrong postcodes, would you mind emailing [email protected] with details of your local area so we can check?

Thank you

I don't think it's the wrong postcode, it's just too rough an instrument - my local site is Manchester and Trafford. There probably are 317 schools across the area as it is a big area! But obviously it is also a densely populated area, so it's really useless for me looking at information for schools over 1 mile away.