The primary school admissions minefield

[mumonawire80]

Hello everyone,

I’m new to mumsnet. I am currently going through the primary school admissions process and trying to get all of the information I need together to make the best choice I possibly can for my son. It's my first time.

I generally end up on the council's website to find what I need but it’s proving difficult. There has to be a better way.

Can anyone out there give me some guidance / where to look etc...

Thanks

Olive

I know different councils do things a bit differently. I can't fault the information provided by Essex online here.
Once I had my shortlist, it was easy to call schools for visits.
Ofsted is useful but not the be all and end all.
The DoE performance website is also useful (and has very good tools for selecting and comparing data from several schools at once) www.education.gov.uk/schools/performance/index.html.
But visits were the most important factor for me.

Put the schools down in the order in which you like them best. Ignore anyone who says that x school will only take them if you put it first. That is old advice. Make sure that you have one guaranteed school because it is better to travel half a mile to a bad school that 5 miles to a bad school. Explore village schools which might be low on numbers due to proximity rather than anything else to do with the school. Remember that it is not necessarily for ever. We got our first choice and it was right at the time but we have had to move one dc. Even v popular schools have children leave and spaces come up.

Thanks SelfRaisingFlour

thanks PerspicaciaTick

It's not really all that painful if you break it down.

1. Be realistic. You don't get a 'choice', you express preferences. For most people schools admit of distance so forget schools miles away. Concentrate only on schools reasonably near your home.
2. Are you religious/ wanting a faith place? Does your child have any medical or SEN, verified by a health professional who will specify that a certain school will addre

Read THIS THREAD. It is from last year's admission round and discusses many of the common pitfalls and clears loads of myths. I thought at the time it would be a good one to read before one submits the application, which unfortunately the op on the thread couldn't do.

Sorry, phone posting! To continue my post above: (and N.B this refers to England - Scotland and Wales have different codes)

It's not really all that painful if you break it down.

1. Be realistic. You don't get a 'choice', you express preferences. For most people schools admit of distance so forget schools miles away. Concentrate only on schools reasonably near your home.
2. Unless you are religious/ wanting a faith place? Does your child have any medical or SEN, verified by a health professional who will specify that a certain school will address the need? Is your child 'Looked after' or adopted from care? Yes? Then look at specific schools you like, irrespective of distance and apply under those priority criteria if you seem eligible.,
3. Focus on schools within easy reach. Read the Ofsted reports, read the policies on their websites, visit, ask local people.
4. of the schools you like, gauge your chances of getting in according to the admissions criteria. You need one that you can give as your fallback - a school that you are best guaranteed to get a place at. Hopefully this will be one of your top preferences, too, but it may be your last preference.
5. List the schools in the genuine order in which you prefer them. This is important: of all schools on your list that could give you a place according to their admission criteria, the LA will allocate you the one which is highest up your list. They will then automatically put you on the waiting list for every school which is higher up your list than the one allocated. It means you can list schools which you would love, but have a slight chance of getting into, and you may strike lucky and get that place - but if not, you get your place at your nearest school, and listing other schools higher does not disadvantage you in getting the 'fallback' place.
6. on National Offer Day accept whatever school is allocated. If you turn this down you may end up with no place, or an even worse place in an equally undesirable school further away. Accepting the place does not affect your chances of a waiting list place in any other school, and after National Offer Day you can go on the waiting list for as many schools as you like.

The thread linked by Reni2 demonstrates exactly what can happen if you do not list your nearest school. The OP did not list her nearest school, and as an over-subscribed school all the places went to people who had put it on their list. They allocate places to people who have applied, and then people who have not been given any place on their list are allocated all the leftover spaces.

So - myths!

1. The LA does NOT 'have to' give you a place in a school on your list. If none of the schools on your list can admit under their admissions criteria, you won't get a place and will be allocated a 'leftover' place - which by definition are ones which many fewer people have wanted.
2. It does not work to only list one school - for the above reasons
3. Or to name your preferred school in every place on the list

4.Putting a school first does not give you any advantage in that school being able to offer you a place. The schools do not know where on the list you put them. If you really want a school put it first. But if a school can admit according to their criteria, it will make no difference where on the list that school was.

The Schools Admissions Code is law. The LA have no power to change it. So if you don't like it, contact your MP. If you identify improvements that the LA could make in presenting their Primary Admissions info / brochure, then obviously contact your relevant local councillor.

Good luck!

IME the best LA admissions brochures have a clear table of all schools showing how many places are available, how many were allocated in each category (SEN / siblings / distance) and the last distance admitted in the previous year. (explaining how the distance is measured - straight line / walking route etc).

I remember that thread. IIRC - and it's referred to but I can't find a link - there was a parallel thread at the time discussing primary admissions tips and myths. Does anyone else recall it? We were all saying then that it needed bumping in the autumn for the 2016 applicants.

My recommendations would be as follows:

1. There are objective criteria for admission in the case of oversubscription. They are a matter of public record. Find them so you can work out vaguely which band you fall in. Also note that factors not in this list are irrelevant (eg where your work is, which nursery DC attends, where his cousin goes).

1. Compare the oversubscription criteria with the admissions data from the last admissions round (also public; included in the application pack from our LA) or, if you can, the last few years, to see whether someone in your position would have got in to each school then. Pay attention to eg new housing developments in the meantime, or a change to PAN.

1. When listing your preferences, put them in your genuine preference order but include at least one school you think you have a good chance of getting into, if there is one. I said on the other thread that "walking five minutes to a bad school is better than driving two miles to a bad school" which is what can easily happen if you don't give yourself a realistic chance.

Ofsted reports give a snapshot. I find the narrative much more informative than the scoring.

I think you linked the other thread on the pfb one somewhere, I'm on my tablet so a pain to find..

I'm in Warwickshire. I don't know how other councils do it, but it's all perfectly straightforward here. We don't have the pressure on places which is obviously part of it. There are 8 primary schools in my town and you can guarantee your child will get a place in one.

Some are better than others, the best 3 are oversubscribed.

Parents are posted a booklet in plenty of time. You follow the instructions in the booklet and create an online account. You can then view a comprehensive table showing all schools in the county, how far they are from you, how they prioritise admissions, how many applicants per place they had last year, how many out-of-catchment applicants were admitted. Each school on the table is linked to its website.

I don't really see how they could make it simpler.

To be honest what mostly made it difficult was the competition for the 'best ' school, and everyone assuming that school x and y were 'the' schools to go for and dismissing schools a and b, when actually they have proved to be perfectly fine and happy schools. I am in a grimy-ish part of London and had the genuine choice of two very good primaries. A lot of the angst I saw around me was uneccessary. Same for secondary.

In primary, OP, you mostly want them to be happy. The school WILL teach them stuff and educational outcome is heavily dependent on parental involvement anyway. If you are an active and engaged parent your child will succeed in pretty much any primary.

yes I probably did but I couldn't find it.

Thread MrsHathaway meant

I found it here and have also bumped it.

Cross posted. You could have told me you were looking

I got the laptop out especially because you went to bed

My LA didn't have any information. They have posters in the nursery with the application closing date. That's it. All the local schools take out advertising in the local newspaper. But tbh, I already know what school I'm going to apply to. We looked at all the primaries before we bought our house! I put down our preference as the three closest school from home. And our catchment school being the first preference. It's very simple.

This basically In primary, OP, you mostly want them to be happy. The school WILL teach them stuff and educational outcome is heavily dependent on parental involvement anyway. If you are an active and engaged parent your child will succeed in pretty much any primary.

And I have a easy choice because actually the two closest schools are ofsted outstanding, and the third is good. I've never heard a bad word about any of the primaries.

My guess, if you are finding it complicated and downloading hundreds of different brochures, is that you are approaching it from slightly the wrong angle.

It is easy to think that you have a genuine 'choice' from all the schools available - in fact in many ways that is encouraged by much of the information out there - and thus you need to sift information about all schools to find what is 'best' for your child, thinking that you need to decide between 20 or 30 'outstanding' schools...

In fact, in most cases there are really quite a small number of schools where you have a realistic chance of getting a place. For many people, there is only 1 school actually in this category, though in other cases there may be several where you have a chance, or 1 main one and some where you have a small-but-still-possible chance..

Unless you meet very specific religious criteria (Catholic, usually, though some CofE as well), then your nearest schools are those most likely to be the ones you have a chance of getting a place.

This site www.schools-search.co.uk/ will give you a list and map of your closest schools if you enter a postcode, as will www.gov.uk/find-school-in-england though for some reason it won't accept my postcode when I tried it.

Your council booklet should then give you details of the over-subscription criteria for each school. Some councils, though not all, have further information about furthest distance admitted or number of children admitted under each criteria. If this isn't available, then you may well find it elsewhere - www.whatdotheyknow.com often has the replies to similar queries from your area.

This will give you one or more schools that, from past history, someone living in your house would have been given a place at.

Read the Ofsted reports for and visit the schools that you work out you have a realistic chance of getting into, to decide which you put first on your form. If your first choice is a 'with luck and a following wind, in some years I might get in' one, then make certain that your list also contains the 'nearest to a certainty' you have available.

If your initial 'distance' search either throws up no schools you would usually be admitted to (it does happen) OR none that you are prepared to consider, then you need to identify schools further away that did not admit right up to their PAN in previous years - again, many council booklets will contain this information - e.g. PAN 60, admitted 58 - and a) work out whether you can physically get there (you won't get free transport UNLESS this is genuinely the closest school which could have had a place for you - e.g. if you ignore a bad school with spaces 1 mile away and apply for one 4 miles away, although 4 miles is over the limit for free transport, you won't get it because you COULD have had a place in the 1 mile away school) and b) which of them you would be prepared to consider. Undersubscribed schools are usually undersubscribed for a reason - which may be as 'unsinister' as 'geographically remote', but could be a history of very poor performance.

I agree that, if you are finding it very complicated, you are probably approaching it wrongly and overestimating how much 'choice' you really have.

1. Find out how many choices you get in your area.
2. Make a list of the closest schools to you. The list realistically doesn't need to be much longer than the number of choices.
3. Find out when those schools have open days and visit them.
4. Find out the admission criteria for the ones you like and assess how likely you are to get in
5. Fill out the form, preferably with one 'banker' school (i.e. one you should have no problems getting into even if the rest of the form is a bit of a wish list).

In most areas, there will be 1-3 schools you stand a good chance of getting into. For a lot of people it's one, but you might be a lucky person and at the top end. Few people have more realistic options than that.

Ofsted - I wouldn't particularly rate it as a decision making criteria. Particularly if, as is the case at some of my local schools, the last time the 'outstanding' school was physically inspected was 8 years and a different head ago!

You can get a little technical and plot the local schools admission distance circles on a map in different colours and then see which ones your house sits in.
www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm

I did this recently in my area for six nearest schools. I sat inside ONE of them. I then added a school three miles away which is outstanding but went from 3 to 4 forms recently. It included my house. I was amazed! Can't get into my local school but can in the next suburb.

What part of Bucks are you in OP?

The number of choices on the Common Application form depend on where you live - in Harrow you get 6.
Go to open days, but also go to Christmas Fayres/Fairs and Christmas performances. You will then see if the people that attend the school are your kind of people and how staff interact with parents. You'll also get some good cake at reasonable prices too.

Also check out if there are any new schools opening in your area in the year your child starts school; these won't be in CAF and will give you an additional number of choices.

Having 'Been there; Done that' several times over, one of my suggestions would simply be - unless the school down the road is awful, go for that. Being able to walk to school (and therefore to friends houses) counts for a lot. Your child will do equally well and be equally happy in most schools. Obviously there are exceptions but being part of a community can count for a lot in a child's happiness.