Does anyone here have a premium subscription to Locrating?

[Tryingtodobetter82]

I thought this site was great when picking my daughter’s primary school.

I was wondering if anyone would be kind enough to send me a catchment area map for a school near us.

I just can’t justify £8 just to see a map for only one school.

I’m sorry for the cheeky request.

If I were you I would read what the admission to the school says and the use google maps.
Locrating shows old data for catchment and every single catchment is a radius there. No, it is not

Yeh I believe it is not accurate (only what I have read, have never used it).

The LA where I am publishes a map showing secondary school catchment areas. Have you looked into whether your LA does this @Tryingtodobetter82 ?

Also yunno you can put the school down on your form and even if you are not in its area, the worst that will happen is that you will use up a choice with no chance. As long as you put your local banker you'll not lose out.

Edited to add: note the usual MN caveat that you don't "pick" a school - you express a preference but you preference may be ruled out because too many nearer people express the same preference.

Locrating shows absolute rubbish for our school catchment. They don't seem to realise that admissions criteria are often based on walking-distance rather than crow-flies distance. They just scrape cut-off distance data from local authority websites and stick it in their system without verifying it at school level. Presumably there's a disclaimer somewhere.

There's no substitute for checking a school's admissions policy.

I think they use data from the furthest pupil accepted, and then used that to create the catchment radius? I signed up when we were deciding on and thought it was v helpful, especially as it shows data for the last 5 years, rather than just last year (like the council website), also shows where pupils moved onto for secondary which I found hard to find anywhere else.

I think they use data from the furthest pupil accepted, and then used that to create the catchment radius?

They assume it's crow-flies distance and draw a circle. That doesn't work if the school uses walking distance instead.

They also use school census data in a bizarre way which doesn't make any distinction between children admitted on distance and children admitted under other criteria, such as faith, sibling, aptitude, banding etc: https://www.locrating.com/Blog/locrating-catchment-areas-explained.aspx

Yes create the catchment radius / draw a circle same thing...

Ah ok all schools round here do as the crow flies so that didn't matter to us.

Our council website does exactly the same thing, the benefit with locrating is that you can see the previous 5 years, which gives you an idea of the trend. As well as seeing which secondary schools kids go on to.

Drawing a circle or using distance radius is not useful for lots of schools tho. There’s one near us where you could live 3-4 miles away in one direction and be in catchment, but 1.5 miles away in another and not be. (To do with accessibility of local schools in this case)

Worth cross checking with schools acceptance critia too then, but as a tool I found it useful, considering it's an important decision in the grand scheme of things £8 didn't seem like much (you can cancel after 1 month)