Catchment areas

[LucyFarinelli]

How/where do you find what schools catchment areas are?

I'm looking at nursery school/junior school/ primary school for DS (currently 2) but i start uni in september and won't want to move in the middle of my degree so want to get him settled in the catchment area of a good school, but can't find out what the catchment areas are

Please, if you can help, do.
TIA

There is no such thing as a catchment area. The school will be able to tell you how close you needed to be to get a place last year, but you cannot be guaranteed a place this year, even if you live within the same radius.

This is because there might be more places taken by siblings this year, or there just might be more people applying for that particular school.

I know this is not particularly helpful to you, but it's the way the system works.

There are designated area school once you are out of urban areas.

IF a child attends their area school BUT lives further than X miles from said school they are entitled to assistance with transport. IF parents have chosen to send child to any other school apart from their designated area school ( or a special school) no transport assistance is available.

in urban areas it's all done 'as the crow flies' distance from school

in our LA you get a letter in September telling you which is your nearest school and therefore most likely to get a place at -but not always

catchment still exists in some areas
eg we are 0.25miles from school A, and 1 mile from school B, yet we are in school B's catchment.

but broadly for non-religious primaries admission is governed by distance. even that isn't straightforward though - it's sometimes as the crow flies, sometimes by shortest walking route. you need to visit the schools to ask.

The LEA will be able to tell you, there should also be information up on their website as to what the admissions criteria are. In my area, catchments are still used and pretty much all children can attend their catchment school, even the most popular ones. If you want to go outside your catchment school it's more difficult.

Search your council's website. On our local council's website you can search by street and find out what the catchment school is.

Catchments still exist in Scotland.

I'm in Sussex and on our school app were told what our catchmrnt school is. There is no guarantee we get a place there though. I'd call the council and ask them

We have catchment areas here (East Mids city). You can find out from the city council (eg by looking on their website) which your "normal area" school is. It's not always your nearest school, as another poster says; soem parts of our suburb are in the area for the more distant (from them) of the two primaries.

So anywya, contact LEAs OP. here is a map of catchment areas which gives the lie to handmadetail's post (it's secondary schools but you get the idea) You can zoom in and find out which street is in one area and whcih another.

Some schools have formal catchment areas but most don't. Most use distance from the school as a tie breaker but again not all. Distance can be either straight line distance or shortest walking route. As some others have said, contact the LA. If they do operate catchment areas they will be able to tell you where they are. If they do not they will be able to tell you how they measure distance to the school and for each school they will be able to tell you the furthest distance admitted last year.

Thanks ladies, thats really helpful. I have absolutly zero experience with these sorts of things. I'll check out the LEA website and see.

Do religious schools work the same way as non-religious schools in regards to areas??

check check check is all you can do and keep checking, we were given so much wrong and misleading information by other parents, schools and LEA, hence our dd is in the furthest school from home, we couldnt get transport as we didnt apply for our catchment school (told there wasnt one) we had a failed appeal and were basically told ignorance is not a case for appeal even though a lot of the misleading and contradicting information was give by the LEA itself...whenever you contact them get the persons name, we had a really awful time getting dd into reception, she missed a whole term, due to the LEA deciding that after all our fighting she suddenly didnt exist!!...