Please help me understand Gloucestershire education system!!

[Libertymae]

It now looks like a move to Gloucestershire is on the cards in the next few months, and apart from the stress of moving, I can not make head nor tail of how the school catchment areas work. Not helped by me calling the county council yesterday, and the woman giving me completely the wrong info about grammar schools.....as i found out when I spoke directly to one of the schools.

So, taking Grammar out of the equation, and just talking about state schools, if anyone could shed some light on the following, i'd be very grateful.

1. I've looked up the postcode of the house, and the nearest secondary school is Barcarras (3 miles). However, the catchment school on the GCC website is The Cotswold School (8 miles). Is it usual for the catchment school not to be the closest or could the website be wrong? Both schools look fab on paper, so no issue either way but having trawled the forum, I got the impression that you need to live on the doorstep of these schools to get in?

1. How do I find out which primary school my two younger ones would be in catchment for? It wasn't on the website. Again, from trawling through past posts, it looks like many of the primaries are oversubscribed. Are you best just going for nearest school?

1. Does anyone have any experience of moving schools 'in-year' with their children? My kids are about to be Y1, Y3 and Y6 (although we might let the Y6 finish at the school she's at rather than move her). I think I would need to put them on waiting lists and then wait and see??

Thanks so much for your help, it's all bl*y confusing!

The secondary schools do have catchment areas, the primaries generally don't, so whether you get in or not to primary depends on how close you live.

Catchment areas in Gloucester is not catchment in the traditional sense.

Leaving out faith schools, the senior schools work roughly like this:

-children in care
-siblings in catchment
-those in catchment by closest first
-outside catchment siblings
-others

So catchment will be important to your application because it will dictate whether you are no3 or no.6 on the priority list.

This link explains more.

Looking for primary schools, you have roughly the same process except no catchments (yet). So

• children in care

-siblings -others by closest first

So it is normally best to apply to the closest schools you are happy with (not sure how many places you get on the form). If you have a Google, there is a freedom of information request out there that released the furthest distances each school admitted pupils from in about 2010.

I don't know about in year applications, sorry.

Thank you for your replies - it all helps x