Can you find out the number of DCs in a school year per county? Trying to rate chances for an out of catchment high school!

[miljee]

I've been led to believe that Hampshire has an unusually small Sept 98- Aug 99 birthday school year (ie currently in year 4). This will affect the size of the intakes at the high schools, of course. I'm looking at a particular school (in Winchester, 8 miles away) and was wondering if there was a definitive list of numbers per school year I can access? I'm aware, of course of the issue of a complete class being cut that year because the intake is small (there are 36 in DS's year, so either a mega class or 2 'unacceptably' small classes of 18. They've actually mixed year groups.)

I would suspect that your LEA would have that sort of info. We've just had a review of local primary schools and that info was in our local paper, so I don't think it's secret.

We had also had widely circulated reports and rumours of falling rolls.

I went onto our County website and sent a 'general email to the education contact site' with a subject: FAO Schools Places team at LEA.

I asked for figures of the school year groups in our town - (feeding 6 secondary schools).

I had the statistics from then within 24 hours!

HTH

I'll email the Hantsweb and see what happens. I KNOW that information HAS to be in the public domain somewhere but I'm sure it's 'politically sensitive' thus might need unearthing!

As rosin suggested your LEA (probably the Children's Services Dept will have a stats type team - I work in one!!!) that will have this type of info collected from the school census which is conducted each term. If they are not forthcomming with the info you could always formally make it a 'Freedom of Information request'. There is no reason not to share this info with you - can't think that there would be any FOI exemptions that would prevent them realeasing this info. Good Luck.

Hi miljee,

that's exatly the sort of thing I was wondering too - my ds (also inyr 4 now) got a place at a a VERY good primary school although we are wll out of the catchment area, and I heard that was because of a low birth rate that year ( evryone holding out for yr 2000 if you can believe it!).

we'll e in a similar position , wondering whether we need to move nearer for scondary!

hope you nmanage to get the info you want,