Information that must be in LA admissions brochure? Cut off distances?

[infeasibly]

The National Admissions Code says that "The local authority will collate and publish all the admission arrangements in the area in a single composite prospectus". For the contents of the prospectus a note refers to regulations 5, 6 and Schedule 2 of the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 which gives a list of the information that must be in the prospectus.

As far as I can tell, that list doesn't include a statutory duty for them to publish the previous year's National Offer Day cut-off distances for the schools that use distance criteria. I know some Local Authorities do publish this in the prospectus, but I'm wondering if there's any explicit or implicit duty on them all to publish it in order to help families understand their chances of getting a place? If so, where is that duty defined? (I've got a feeling I've read it somewhere but can't put my finger on it now).

I expect all LAs have their particular circumstances, and there will be some trends, but that's why data helps to give an overall picture. How do people know what happens in their areas if the data and analysis isn't available?

My LA may (or may not) be typical of relatively wealthy London boroughs where many go private, good and outstanding schools are heavily oversubscribed, and the small number of RI schools are undersubscribed. Lots of families move into the area for its schools, but all the expansion options are exhausted and locations for new-builds are non-existent. The language on the council website discourages people from moving in by making it clear how oversubscribed the schools are.

Everyone gets 6 preferences. Many will also be applying to multiple private schools, but the best of those are also oversubscribed. They weigh their private offer(s) against their state offer, and their chances of getting higher preference offers (bearing in mind some of the high attaining state schools do better than some of the privates). So it's messy, and as the LA has an austere target of 0% surplus in all of its schools it manages the situation carefully.

There are always many more state applications than there are places so there are always many families without offers on National Offer Day, by design. They are reassured that places will come available by September, and sure enough they always do. That is because of the waiting list movement. The most oversubscribed private secondary schools require a substantial deposit of the first term's fees in early March (after state offers go out but before they're accepted) so many drop out of the state system at that point and that is when the biggest movement occurs, but there are several waves after that, including a big one in July when the council contacts no-shows for the borough-wide transition day. Movement will continue until early September (when some students don't turn up for their first day).

Looking at the numbers for 2016 here are a few examples of the increases in distance between March and September ..

Outstanding Secondary 1 - increase of 1070m

Outstanding Secondary 2 - increase of 320m

Outstanding Secondary 3 with two catchment areas - increases of 160m and 900m respectively

Good Secondary 1 - increase of 1090m

Good Secondary 2 - increase of 3000m

Secondary Free School (not yet graded) - increase of 1633m

So, apart from anything else, that means awful lot of houses are incorrectly marked as "outside of the successful admissions area for 2016" on a well known property portal. Understandably the council are unlikely to be bothered by that if it discourages more state-school applicants from moving into the area.

For the record, I just got some Sep 1st figures for a completely different London borough, with FSM stats almost double those of my borough (so a different demographic profile).

There is less movement overall, but still I'm seeing cut-off distances increasing significantly (between 100m and 1200m) for 4 good or outstanding schools.

Another reason why cut-off distances may sometimes not show the whole picture is where schools have defined catchment areas that are markedly asymmetrical.

So some towns or areas have schools that are located quite close together (e.g. within the built-up area of a town), but then have defined catchment boundaries that extend radially outwards but only in some directions.

If the admission criteria are e.g.

• Statement
• Looked after children
• Siblings in catchment
• Others in catchment
• Siblings out of catchment
• Others out of catchment

then distances can be hugely misleading. For example, a family without a sibling could live 500 m away from school A but fall into the catchment of school B (and thus not get in to A, if the school fills with catchment children), but a similar family who lived 4 km away in the opposite direction would be in catchment and thus get into school A.

I have seen catchment maps that look like slices of cake (where schools are clustered in the middle of a town, with the 'slices' going way out into the countryside but with children very close to the school in the town not getting places), and also like stripes (where schools have been built almost in a straight line across a town, with the catchments running up and down but not sideways). In both cases, distance would give an inaccurate picture unless very clearly presented alongside a detailed map.

I appreciate that in built-up areas, admissions criteria that work as pure 'circles based on distance from school) do more or less work - but in towns where the schools also serve surrounding rural areas, defined catchment areas [even where not all children from within them are always admitted, as happens occasionally, in which case the rural areas miss out because distance is the tiebreaker] are quite common

Can'tkeepawayforever, yes, the cut off distance data is only helpful when distance is the main oversubscription criteria. In the schools I've looked at it is (after statemented, LAC, siblings etc). However they don't need to be circular crow-flies distances - there are online tools for mapping travel distance too (just not necessarily using the same route-maps as the LA though). It's possible to also include catchment areas but it obviously starts to get more complicated.

Those catchment areas you describe sound interesting. Which areas are they? Does the Rightmove school checker include them, and if so is it accurate?

Just had a quick check of one of the areas with defined catchment boundaries.

Rightmove does include them - states inside or outside admissions area in a given year for some of the schools involved. I would say that it is NOT accurate at all - in that it massively overstates one admissions area and denies that even properties right next to one of the other schools are in its admissions area.

Then you should report it to them (and let us know what happens). Address to report problems is [email protected].

To be fair I don't know whether it is helpful - in that it is an area where getting into the schools involved is massively variable each year, so last year's data (even if accurately input into the system) has very little predictive value.

At least being very obviously wrong means that anyone using Rightmove will go 'No, that's obviously wrong', contact the school or LA, whereas if it 'looks OK', then more people will end up being misled.

They're more likely to remove it from that school altogether than try and correct it. Other schools with complicated admissions (including faith schools) have been omitted.

Rightmove are buying the data from a third party, so the more people who tell them it's rubbish the better.

I suppose that I'm not particularly convinced that tools like School Checker are sensible - in that they give people what seems to be information but which is actually garbage unless fully qualified.

So people rely on it for really big life decisions: 'The Internet - in fact, a big branded site, said this house was in catchment', without realising how dodgy the underlying data is.

By dodgy, I don't just mean 'haven't taken catchment into account', but also:

• You would get in if you were C of E, but not if you were Methodist
• You'd get in if a sibling, but not a non-sibling.
• You would get in if a younger sibling of someone in years 8-11, but not if you are an older sibling or a sibling of someone in 6th form
• You would have got in last year, because there was a bulge class, but not any other year in the last 8.
• You would not have got in last year, but are likely to for every year from now on, because they've just agreed to up their PAN by 30 and have a huge building programme.

In many ways, it is better to see that the information isn't available, and contact the school, rather than see what appears to be precise and accurate information, differentiating down to the single house level, but which in fact can't be relied on.

Yes, I agree it would be better if it wasn't available, but it is, and people are using it. There was a whole sponsored thread on here with mumsnetters saying how useful it was. So, given that the pandora's box is open I think people should be active in telling them how dodgy the contents is.

Ideally it needs a high profile consumer programme or website to expose and embarrass them. Heads in sand won't help.