Will accepting a nursery place help with reception admissions at the same school?

[Cluelessmamaa]

We’ve been offered a nursery place at a brilliant school but would this have any impact on getting into reception, well the actual school?
It does state on the admissions page that it doesn’t guarantee you a place, however I wanted to ask other parents from experience, does it help? Or does it literally make no difference?

For context we live 4 miles away! I’m seriously shocked we were offered a nursery place.
LO attends a lovely private nursery. We’ve been there for almost a year and I’m really torn. Dd is 3 and will be 4 in October.
I applied for a nursery vacancy hoping it might help for a school place and my family live in that area. I applied for housing years ago and thought something might come up by now and we’d basically live and go to school there. I know that was wishful thinking!
I don’t know if I should accept the offer and cross fingers that we’ll get into the school too or just stay where we are and apply for it when it’s time. It’s a 15 minute drive but we live in another borough so I don’t even know how that would work when applying for schools. I’d want to apply for this school but also there’s 2 where I live that I would put on my list. I don’t even know if it’s possible to apply for a school in a different borough as well as your own. I hope I’ve given enough info.

So yes please tell me what you think I should do parents!

The school only goes up to 7 and then there is a separate school to apply for.
sorry if I’m making you go round in circles, I have tried to look at the admissions page! The websites a bit confusing to follow too! Ahh

Makes no difference at our school.

This
the nursery attached to my kids primary takes loads of kids as they all get funded hours now and they don’t all go at the same time. When my youngest was there about 60-70 children were on roll but they had 2 sub groups of 20 so max 40 in there at any one time. The reception intake is 60 and there are other surrounding nurseries too with kids in catchment etc…

when it comes to reception intake you have to apply again and attending the nursery is not part of the criteria for a place. Most school websites will stipulate this too.

Each school will have its own oversubscription criteria and it's not actually illegal to have some priority for children who have attended the school's attached nursery but they have to demonstrate that no groups are unduly disadvantaged by their criteria and a blanket priority for children who attended the attached nursery would automatically be a disadvantage for children who stayed at home or were looked after by a childminder for age 0-4. More usually, any such condition giving priority to nursery children is linked to specific categories of disadvantage eg Pupil Premium children who attended the school nursery are selected ahead of the final "everyone else" category.

HOWEVER all this only matters if the school is oversubscribed and the numbers of kids are falling each year so some schools aren't oversubscribed any more.

Just look at the council website for criteria.

It’s rare to have nursery or preschool have any effect. Especially if they use LA criteria and not their own like some academies do. So I suspect it would be better to keep your child nearer your house and nearer potential friends and families in your area

Assuming this is not a private nursery and school? If it’s state then you’re very unlikely to get a place in a primary school 4 miles away unless it’s undersubscribed. Even more so if you’re in a city. Keep your dc where they are currently . If your housing situation changes then apply when you live a lot closer.

Maybe post the admissions criteria for the school as there’ll be plenty of people on here who can help you make sense of it.

No, it has no influence at all. Schools manage their own admissions for nursery. However, from reception upwards, it’s managed by the Local Authority. The LA will not look at who is currently attending the nursery, and allocates places based on the admissions criteria only.

No.

It's irrelevant.

Nursery admissions are not automatically connected to primary admissions.

Go to your council website.
Find schools
Go to primary admissions.
They will give the admission criteria for each school in the area.

look at the primary school admissions policy (not nursery) they should it displayed on their website. You will be able to tell from their oversubscription criteria if they take attending the nursery into account when allocating reception places.
Many don’t.
you can also look on the council website to see a breakdown of offers for this year and previous years to see how oversubscribed it is.

Very rarely if ever does it make any difference in terms of admissions to reception.

If you can’t find the admissions policy for the school (not the nursery) then email the school reception or phone them and ask them to direct you to it/ send you a copy.

It normally goes something like, SEN/ECHP, looked after children (children in care), children with siblings (sometimes to a max distance), children of staff, children in catchment/ distance from school. But some schools have a priority area and/ or religious criteria in there too. Some have priority for a language. Only way to work it out is to find the admissions document and read/ understand it. For example under the religious criteria it will rarely be sufficient to say you “go to church”, often you’ll have to go to a specific church and then have this verified by the priest/ vicar.

The council should also publish “last offered” places for the year before which shows how far away you could live and still have got a place that year.

Please just call the school first thing and speak to the Admissions Officer.

Explain your dilemma and ask if realistically someone living at your post code will get a place in Reception.
They are likely to say no with you living 4 miles away. Even in a low birth rate year that's a really long way away to live from your school.
Good luck with it tho.

X

@Cluelessmamaa if you're willing to DM me the school website I can look for you.

In our local school you do some extra points for being at the school nursery but you need to check the school admission policy.

You need to talk to the school to get an answer.

She really wouldn't need to call the school, the admission criteria has to be published on the school website. If she can't find it then all she needs to do is type the school name followed by admission criteria into a search engine and it will bring up the page.

I can understand the reasons why attending the school
nursery isn’t a guarantee of a place at the school but it does seem a shame for kids who go to the nursery and don’t get a place because they are not siblings or in a higher priority group. If the nursery is part of the school, admissions should be subject to the same criteria and coordinated by the same body so there isn’t this mismatch between nursery places and reception places.

@Cluelessmamaa youve been given good advice here. You seem to be looking at the wrong page. It’s admissions information for the primary school or (perhaps called an infant school if it only goes up to year 2) or reception that you need.

It will set out admissions criteria in order. If it’s a state school in England then the criteria will almost certainly be as follows:

1. looked after/adopted children/previously looked after
2. children with a medical need/echp
3. siblings of current pupils
4. all other children ranked based on distance from the school

Ive never seen nursery attendance be included and I’ve seen lots of parents make this mistake at my DC’s oversubscribed primary school. Faith schools include faith as a criteria, usually after siblings and before distance.

You can find the last distance offered stats on the local authority website for the last few years or ask them directly to see whether your DC would have got a place based on your postcode in previous years. In our case they used their own system to measure the distance based on specific road routes (so Google maps wasn’t accurate), so I also emailed the LA and asked them to confirm the distances from my postcode to have a better idea.

They usually are. They just cant control who applies. The number of places is often different as well.

Generally the criteria is the same for nursery and Reception. It's just that in areas where lots of families have 2 working parents, many children will be settled in private nurseries before 3. Also most schools don't allow nursery children to attend wrap-around care due to ratios, so it's more inconvenient. This means less children apply for nursery. If the school gives priority to nursery children, parents have to make a tricky choice whether to deal with awkward logistics for a year to improve their chances of a place. Plus it penalises people who move when their child is 3, or who just haven't looked at admissions criteria yet.

OP I hope you have found the Reception admissions policy. If not, do ask the school office for the link to it online. Saying they support transition only applies to those who get a place in their Reception.

But as a PP said, a lot of parents may be unable to use the nursery school as they need longer hours so choose a private nursery or other childcare. So to prioritise nursery attendance would discriminate against them – which is why it’s unusual.

But if it is the case, as everyone else says, it will be in the admissions info. Also happy to look at that @Cluelessmamaa if it's helpful to DM me the name of the infant school.

Sorry - some pps were saying that the school controls nursery admissions and the LA is in charge of primary admissions. And I see your point about numbers but surely in many cases the nursery will be smaller than the reception intake so there would still be room to fit all nursery kids in and take other nearby kids who went to childminders etc.?

The nursery at my DC’s primary school can take up to double the amount of children admitted into Reception.

Even if the nursery applied exactly the same criteria as the Reception intake, and the exact same children applied for the nursery and Reception, they couldn’t guarantee that every child attending the nursery would move into Reception because of the mismatch in the admission numbers.

I think it can also be really devastating for parents not to get a place in the school their children attend nursery at, even if this was always going to happen due to distance and it sounds like this might apply to you.

When we were deciding whether to take up our state primary place for DS and visited his primary school, the head told us they were about to do 2 appeals for children who had been at the nursery and hadn't been admitted to the school.

@metellaestinatrio the nursery attached to DS school operates 9-3 term time only without wraparound care. So there are a lot of parents nearby who use private nursery because they work full time and obviously can't operate around these hours. If nursery admissions were prioritised, their children then wouldn't be able to attend their nearest school which most people think is more unfair which is why the admissions criteria mostly work as they do. Whilst the nursery is much smaller than the reception intake here and yet the school is oversubscribed and some nursery children miss out, it's because the cost of housing means the vast majority of parents both work.

None at all…the school has no influence on who is admitted. The criteria is very strict and you will be treated exactly the same way as everyone else…with the admissions policy being followed. As it should be!

Understood. As I said, I get the reasons why the system is set up as it is. It just seems a shame for the nursery children to spend a year settling in one place only to have to move. I appreciate you take this risk as a parent if you send your child to a school nursery miles away, but if it’s your closest one and then your child misses out on a Reception place it seems unfair. There is no perfect answer - perhaps the current arrangement is the least worst option.