Buckinghamshire Catchment Areas and the Greenwich Judgement

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There's a map of Buckinghamshire school catchment areas here: arcg.is/1TfLPP. Many of them coincide with the borough boundary.

I've been reading up about the Greenwich Judgement on Wikipedia here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Judgement. It says that catchment areas are allowed, and that they can follow the borough boundary, so long as there is some reasonable justification for it, other than "it's the borough boundary and we want to prioritise places for children in our borough".

So what is the justification for Buckinghamshire schools to have catchment areas coinciding with the borough boundaries? Has anyone ever challenged them on it?

The catchements areas are not entirely relevant as allocation of places to the Grammar schools are done on qualifying score and then distance to the school. DCs from outside of Buckinghamshire can and do gain places at Bucks Grammars.

However, I do wonder how many OOC DCs attend Buck secondary Moderns (few I would guess), perhaps there would be more justification to challenge the catchements for those schools?

To be honest most schools that have catchments will be areas that are in a particular LA and run to their boundaries. This is historic and comes about from the situation 10+ years ago when all schools were LA schools etc.
As far as I know nobody has challenged the catchment zone unless it is blatantly obvious the school has been trying to do some social engineering. In the advent of academies and MATs the concept of LAs and their power has diminished but whether you could successfully challenge the issue I would doubt. If you do decide to then you need to be referring it to the Schools Adjudicator.
The whole point with the Greenwich judgement is that it was about the LA giving priority to those that lived in Greenwich over those outside the borough, rather than where the catchment boundary was.

I agree with Admission that a challenge would be unlikely to succeed.

To put this into context, most people in MK prefer their comprehensives to the Buckinghamshire Secondary moderns. You would be mad to opt for an Aylesbury secondary modern if you lived in Oxfordshire and could get into Lord Wiliams in Thame. Ditto if you live in Hertfordshire and can go to Tring School or Ashlyns over Chesham or Aylesbury Secondary Moderns. There are perhaps debates about the Bucks Secondary moderns such as Waddesdon which has a tiny catchment and selects based on C of E worship. Other secondary modern schools, if they have spaces, will take out of catchment. If you want a grammar, get the required score and live close enough, in or out of county, and you willl get a place.

Well Prh47bridge and Admissions if this latest judgement on Hounslow schools is anything to go by you're absolutely right about not needing any particular justification for catchment areas to follow the borough boundary, even if they aren't "historic". It really makes me wonder why councils make a fuss about the Greenwich Judgement when other areas are managing to prioritise for in-borough pupils without too much hassle. I think perhaps they just misinterpret what it means.

The Greenwich judgement is significant for those councils that don't use defined catchment areas for their schools but simply use distance to determine admissions (i.e. most councils). They cannot give priority to applicants from within the council area. Yes, they can get round it by having defined catchment areas for all their schools but that can lead to other problems.

I think you are getting a bit stewed up over nothing. The grammar schools recruit from near and far with the possible exception of SWBGS in Marlow which has a small PAN.

Who from out of County wants the secondary schools? So who cares?

I'm not stewed up at all BubblesBuddy, you're jumping to conclusions. I don't even live in Buckinghamshire, or particularly care about it - I'm just interested in how other councils are interpreting the Greenwich Judgement, because my local area is one of the ones that always moaned about how it stops them from being able to provide school places efficiently to its own residents and lobbied for it to be repealed. It seems they needn't have been so concerned about it after all.

The Greenwich judgement was in 1989. At the time it was a significant case for clarifying admissions processes and is particularly relevant where out of borough or out of county is only a short distance away from the school and lots of children from this area want places at a school. These children get in on distance rather than an in borough or in county resident who lives further away. If there are enough places for everyone, Greenwich makes no odds.

Schools and local authorities do not need to provide schools purely for their own residents. They provide schoools to meet demand. With academies, and in fact with funds being distributed via a pupil formula, schools rarely care where pupils come from these days. Bums on PAN seats means schools get the formula money they expect and will expand if they want to in order to meet demand. Having many spare places is a bigger nightmare than competition for places.

Many areas do not have enough school places and planning for new schools is very difficult. The Greenwich judgement is not helpful in that respect. Numbers become more difficult to predict because you don't know where the children are coming from because you don't have a definitive area. School planning is also difficult when schools go in and out of fashion, and that applies to ones in neighbouring boroughs too, and you have to factor in parental preferences which are also hard to predict. Never mind new housing, immigration, an aging population, birth rate etc. Schools just want to know they will be full.

It is all a bit of a minefield but the Greenwich judgement is only part of the jigsaw. By the way, you did expressly mention Bucks in your first post so I took it at face value that you were interested in Bucks.

Not quite the same but worth thinking of the case of the Latymer School in Edmonton (NW London). It had its catchment area challenged and the school adjudicator said it couldn't stop children from sitting the exam, but the school could prevent "out of catchment" children from getting a place unless they had moved into the catchment area by a certain date after the exam. In this case, the catchment wasn't based on some arbitrary boundary line but on a commute time of less than hour - very sensible, one would think!

Edmonton is NE London sorry.

If the schools fills up from catchment, that is fine, but it may disappoint a lot from further away if the school is popular. In fact SWBGS in Marlow, Bucks has a catchment that extends to Maidenhead, Berks. It fills up from catchment and insome years may have to turn wualified children away who live in catchment. How should they decide who comes to the school?

Other grammar schools also fill up by having out of country children. They want the NOR to be at its maximum or they have to make staff redundant and make cuts. No school wants that. The fact that schools have catchment areas, by boundaries or distance, means that it is fair. Big commute times really bite into the catchment of other schools and a only super selective can do this. A standard, but oversubscribed school, will either have to expand or decide how to have a cut off point for applicants. Near me, commuting for an hour would be unheard of. However, some of the successful secondary moderns would be twice the size and the other less successful ones would close if there was no decisions made about how to cap numbers at the successful schools.

All neighbouring LAs provide schools so the boundary is natually the county boundary. It is how local taxes are levied after all, so people expect there to be suitable schools for their children within a reasonable commute and to have a reasonable chance of getting a place. If you live elsewhere, there are schools in your LA.