School catchment areas

[niceuser]

How do you find out how big school catchments were last year and in previous years?

We're moving house and want to know which schools our son will be likely to get into.

All the nearest schools don't have formal catchments. It's looked after children, siblings and then children who live nearest.

There was a great tool on Rightmove 'school checker' that told you how far away children who got in to the school in previous years lived, but it doesn't seem to work any more. It now states 'not over subscribed' for all our local schools and I know for a fact that's not true! Is there another website that does this??

Our local council has a distance checker on their website which shows distance and most recent admissions . The distance are also shown in the starting school booklets on their website.

Yes, your local LEA site will be the best source of reliable information about how places have been allocated in previous years.

Our local council site has a pdf we can download which lists all the facts like how many applied for each school, how many siblings and furthest distance.

I've notice that rightmove is wrong recently. I looked at a house on my street which is up for sale and it said a school a mile away was undersubscribed. It's the most sought after school in the area and according to the council stats over 300 people applied for the 30 places!

I was wondering about this too and couldn't find the info on our local council website. I'm new to the whole system so could have easily missed something.

Our borough publishes it along with the school applications info

schoolcatchment.co.uk/
It seems to be accurate for our area.

Agree Righmove's totally wrong now.

@mordoll it's a shame they have info for limited areas, but thank you for the link. Unfortunately my area isn't on there.

Would anyone be willing to have a look at our local council website if I sent them the address privately? It's not urgent, I don't even have a child yet! But I'm trying to learn the school system here so that we can make a decision about where to live if necessary.

@kescilly I'll have a look for you if you like

Thanks! I’ll send it along to you.

Ive used this site to check previous intake distance www.192.com/schools/

@user1490043295 That's exactly what I was after. Thank you!

The inaccurate info on Rightmove is really worrying. People could be led to believe that their child is likely to get a place at a school when they're not at all.

the schoolcatchment tool (schoolcatchment.co.uk/ ) is wrong for our area. we didn‘t get into any of the 6 (!!!) primary schools that are all about 1 mile or less from out house, yet the tool shows us in catchment for 2.

I really wouldn't use 192 either - I've just checked and it's got a local school completely wrong.

Go look on your local LEA site - if you can't find the relevant detail, you are welcome to PM and I'll take a look. All the other aggregators sites are prone to errors.