How do you decide how many children to admit?

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Here is a question for anyone who has the thankless task of managing preschool admissions.

Let's assume you have a waiting list with X number of children on it.

How do you decide how many places you can offer for the forthcoming academic year?

And how do you decide how many of those should be given to the 'rising 4s' (i.e. children who are going to be in their last 3 terms before school), and how many places you should hold back for children turning 3 as the year goes on?

Think my head is going to explode.

Our preschool has maximum numbers (set by OFSTED and dependant on both staff ratios and floor space). We work out from that how many spaces we have, and then offer them to those on the waiting list in age order (ie the eldest child gets priority).

The school that we feed has 3 admissions a year though, which means that spaces are freed up in January, April and September.

I think the 3 admissions thing must be a huge help.

Here, we're at odds with the fact that the school will only admit children once a year, but due to the EY funding being available from the term after a child's 3rd birthday, we have children wanting to come into preschool in Sept, Jan & April.

We stopped doing it strictly on age alone because we had problems where Child A, born in October, could join the waiting list today and pinch a place from Child B, born in November, who had been on the waiting list since birth.

Our new system works quite well, so I know which children stand to be admitted, assuming there's space for them. The trouble lies in working out how many I can admit.

For example, 15 hours could be used as 5 x 3 hour sessions, or it could be used as 6 x 2.5 hour sessions.

So I can't just say OK, we have enough sessions for 22 children to have 5 each, because it might not work out like that.

And I really, really hate turning children away.

It is quite a job isn't it?
We don't "feed" into any specific place, some chldren come here for a while before moving onto bigger nurseries (longer hours thn we offer), some straight to reception, some state some private.

We ask current parents now if they're staying/going after Christmas.
If staying, do you want to increase your sesions?
Once that is done, we look at the waiting list and space available. Most of our kids come in for 2 sessions a week initially.
We take those on the waiting list longest first. Then those who have had a sibling with us previously.
We usually get everyone in, even if they come a bit later than they would have liked (people move or get a late offer in a larger nursery)

I just been doing this for our pre-school for the first time(i've just taken over as administrator) and I hadn't realised what a headache it'd be. We only run 3 hour sessions each morning so it's not quite like your sessions which I presume are longer?

What I did was write to each child (well the parents/carers)that doesn't come every day and ask if they want to up sessions in Jan or April 2011, I said that I appreciate you may not have thought ahead to April just yet!! Most have replied with their preference.I also asked if there was a reason they don't come certain days, eg attend another setting or want a family day. This has allowed me to do a spreadsheet of current sessions, then what people wnat in Jan and april, then marked days people won't want. From that I can see how many places I have left and have rung people on the waiting list to see if I can fit them in on their prefered days and number of sessions.

We are allowed 30 children a day by Ofsted but the staff prefer to limit it to 26, so I am trying to stick to that each day. But it does mean that the sessions we have to keep for emergenciy cases is covered really by the extra 4 children we could have per day as per Ofsted so i'm kinda ignoring that

Our admissions policy states we admit in order of age, and the old administrator hasn't noted anywhere the date of application(so the date the child went on the waiting list) but I have added this to the info I put on my waiting list spreadsheet so that in the future we can consider this and maybe change our policy.

My spreadsheet is so multicoloured it's eye watering BUT it does show instantly where I am!!!

The main school our children go onto has 2 intakes in Sept and Jan so we lose children in July and Dec so this does help a little.

Until I sat down with the figures I hadn't truely appreciated the extent of the task!!

I am panicking a little about falling numbers as we currently lose 22 out of 35 children in July but i'm sure that'll work itself out

At the moment we are very popular, which hasn't always been the case so the issue of worrying about fitting all the children in is a new one! But it is a good problem to have I suppose, just not for my head

What a good problem to have :O

We haven't been "full" for a few years. We have noticed though that the children who are with us are taking up their full 15 hours entitlement earlier than they might once have done. This September is particularly bad as one of our feeder schools has opened it's own pre-school nursery - boo! We are also finding that parents in this area turn up once their child is eligible for funding, and the child starts the next week. It's VERY difficult to plan ahead with parents like that!

The plan is no more than 60 on the books, with max 26 in each session.

o