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.

Ah - if everything is done on postcode that makes sense.
The problem of people seeing too many schools is that MN is trying to use a list of postcodes for 2 different purposes.

If I type my postcode in MN local it will offer 3 local groups: my town, a neighbouring town, and a neighbouring area of county. This is quite useful in terms of finding a MN local group as I might be interested in things going on in areas quite close to me.

This is no use at all for schools, where I simply wouldn't be interested in (state comprehensives at least) schools in . No one from my town would apply to a comprehensive school in . They just wouldn't - you wouldn't get into a popular school on distance and why would you make a difficult journey to get to an unpopular school?

The schools that people would (and do) apply to from my town are

• schools in town and immediate surrounds
• grammar schools in neighbouring area
• private schools in neighbouring town

... but you can't get that list by filtering on postcode - well you can, but it would have to be a lot more sophisticated, with the need for lots of tailoring for local knowledge if it were to work everywhere.

so I end up with a list of 53 schools whereas in reality someone in my town would only ever apply to about 20 - making the list unusable.

Thank you both, that's really useful to know. It's true postcodes aren't always the best measure for all areas. They can be useful in some situations as you point out but for others less so!

It would be a considerably bigger undertaking to change the structure of Mumsnet Local but it sounds like something we should have a think about, particularly in regard to how people want to search for schools.

In the meantime, have either you found the map useful?

We hope that part of the usefulness will be in Mumsnetters sharing their thoughts about local schools. So although only four schools may be in your catchment you might benefit from another Mumsnetter saying that School 1 is especially good for X and School 2 is fab for Y.

Hmmm. Maybe. I don't really trust what other people say about schools because a) it's very personal - my "hands off doesn't hothouse kids" is someone else's "doesn't stretch kids enough" and b) I think people like to feel that they have made the best choice for their kids, and part of that is not admitting flaws AND denigrating the other options…. So no, personally, I wouldn't seek out reviews from anonymous Mumsnetters and use that in any way for making school choices.

My postcode when entered (N12) brings up Haringey or Islington. Neither of those are my borough!

PseudoBadger sorry about that, we've fixed that now.

(Fair enough ElizabethMedora, it is a very personal choice)

N1 London brings up Plumpton College in Lewes as being in Islington. Teething trouble?

Hello Dad164 Do you mean this listing?

That entry hasn't come from School Guide but from the school manually adding it. Possibly they felt the open morning would be of interest to people living in Islington but it's out of date so we've zapped it now.

Thanks for flagging to us!

It's gone from the N1 listing now, but in it's place now appear several schools from west London.

I think your database integration is up the spout!

Fire the coders.

Hello there, we're afraid that was our error. Someone, sometime thought to add W7 as a islington postcode... We've removed it now so those schools should have gone.

Definitely not a Tech fault though who are in fact entirely blameless - aside from somehow not predicting and accounting for random human error when they did the database integration.

Shall feed them and instead of firing.

That reply from the Schools guide was extremely arrogant. I have emailed Mumsnet with the incorrect school data I was looking at (which was information drawn from an old OFSTED report rather than the current one).

People should look at the OFSTED site direct and the council ones to find schools. I don't see why you would want to look at information second hand. I can see why you would want to see the opinions of other mumsnetters. Maybe mumsnet could signpost to councils and OFSTED and ditch the schools guide.

Please could some consideration be taken into those areas with the three tier system. We have middle school and high school admissions at the same time you have secondary.

In mums at local the three tier school system is pigeon holed into the two tier labels (primary and secondary) which just leaves guess work as to which catergory you have out our schools in to.

Hello petalunicorn thanks for emailing us.

The last update School Guide did from OFSTED was four weeks ago we believe and will be updated again in two weeks so it's possible that if an OFSTED report was published in the last few weeks it isn't appearing yet. We'll look into your case though and flag it to School Guide if something is amiss.

We feel it might be useful to some to have reviews and top level data in one place but completely appreciate that it's also useful to go direct to councils too.

@NickNacks

Please could some consideration be taken into those areas with the three tier system. We have middle school and high school admissions at the same time you have secondary.

In mums at local the three tier school system is pigeon holed into the two tier labels (primary and secondary) which just leaves guess work as to which catergory you have out our schools in to.

Thanks NickNacks that's a really good point and something we'll have a think about.

I'm intrigued by this. Do you have a financial arrangement with School Guide?

But it isn't top level data - not sure what that means. It will always be behind the official data in time - you can see an ofsted report the day it is published on the ofsted site and the same for performance data and so on. I think it is irresponsible to encourage people to look at this, I am afraid - you should be sending them to the original, authoritative sources where all this and much more is available.

If people want personal reviews and a place to chat about schools, then fine, everyone is clear what they are getting.

Just to flag up what doobledootch has already mentioned - it looks like all of NIs primary schools are listed under Belfast - I don't think it's been split into areas at all. There is also no info at all bar the name of the school and the map.

MNHQ, there's missing data in my area - Richmond upon Thames. At least 3 primaries are missing (Trafalgar, Nelson, Archdeacon Cambridge's). In the list of secondaries there was a listing for a proposed free school in a neighbouring borough, but the 2 free schools that have already got Gvt approval to open in the borough in 2015 and 2017 weren't listed.

The DfE publish a list of approved free schools in pre-opening stage so there is no excuse not to have them listed.

All of Northern Irelands primary schools are also listed under Co Antrim - from Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh, Derry and Down - all under Co Antrim. Really I don't know why you bothered. No information either.

What's the latest on this tool? Not confident about promoting on Mumsnet Barnet webpages, fb page or twitter feed quite yet!

Hi,

We've yet to find a case of schools actually being missing. Unfortunately though, sometimes people aren't finding the schools they'd expect because of an issue with how Mumsnet's local sites are defined.

For each local site we tell our system the various post code prefixes that represent that local site. So for example, "Richmond upon Thames" was defined as "SW13 SW14 TW1 TW9 TW10 TW11 TW12".

Schools Guide receive data from DfE and Ofsted and this contains the school's post code. For example Trafalgar School in the borough of Richmond upon Thames has a post code of TW2 5EG. Therefore, despite it clearly being in that borough, our system wasn't showing it in that Local site, because TW2 wasn't in the definition for Richmond upon Thames.

We've now added TW2 to Richmond upon Thames so that school, and all other schools with a TW2 post code will now appear.

Postcodes for a given area can sometimes be a bit tricky. There are some towns which have a variety of prefixes and there are various other anomalies, not to mention good old human error.

In the case of Belfast you're absolutely spot on - it has been defined as postcode BT but that clearly isn't specific enough so we've refined it to BT1-17 and BT29. Hopefully you should get more relevant listings now.

If you spot any other missing schools then please do let us know and we can check its postcode against the postcodes for each local area.

Thank you

Ours has now appeared, thanks. Why are the listings full of paediatric first aid courses and 'procedure in case of school closure' guff, though?

The school admissions process can vary quite dramatically from area to area and sometimes even from school to school so our listings of schools aren't intended to be a replacement to using government resources.

We've always had school listings on our local sites but they were a bit sketchy in their coverage in the past because they weren't coming from official sources.

We're hopeful that now our local listings will compliment the existing tools out their and give Mumsnetters a place to look up an overview of the information, see what other Mumsnetters think and share their own reviews of a school.

We're keen to keep improving so if there is other things you'd like to add or explain more feel free to mention!

@KittiesInsane

Ours has now appeared, thanks. Why are the listings full of paediatric first aid courses and 'procedure in case of school closure' guff, though?

They shouldn't be really, in the past we relied on people adding listings so unfortunately some sites have got some ahem, less useful entries. Any you spot do report and we'll remove asap.

Thank you

I live in what could be called south Crouch End, which means that although we are in Harringey, we are very close to Islington, with Islington children coming to Haringey schools, and Harringey children going to Islington schools, so around here the borough boundary not a useful division, yet mumsnet local is based on Boroughs?