In Year Admissions- how do they work.

[Aroundtheworldin80moves]

Any Admissions experts know this?
In Year Admissions request submitted for September. Council website says all forms received from 3rdJune to 13th June will be considered at the same time.
Applied for 2 places in different years.
I'm guessing they will considered in order of admissions criteria. But will them being siblings have a bearing on their applications? So if there are X places in Yr4, but we are X+1 nearest applicant, but our Yr2 is offered a place will this mean older one is a sibling and offered a place. Or will it just mean she has higher priority on the Waiting List? (Hopefully that makes sense)

(Military family applying for a School next to new base- however there is likely to be a lot of applications- school states it can have up to 50% new children each year)

It will depend on the individual criteria, but normally a sibling only counts as a sibling for admissions purposes once they are on roll at the school. So child a would have to be offered and accept (at minimum) the place before before child b gets sibling preference; some areas would insist the child had actually started the school. You would need to check exactly what the criteria is for the relevant schools.

Also check if sibling priority works both ways - sometimes only older siblings count....

Managed to find the Oversubscription criteria. It mentions siblings on roll, no mention of age.
I suppose it's just a waiting game.

If you are a military family moving because of service requirements then the situation could be different than normal. Most LAs are helpful in such circumstances and try to make things happen quickly. There firstly should be no need to be precise over an address, the regulations allow for this to be in an area rather than a specific address.
What you need to do is speak to the LA and the school about the fact that you are military family and ask them to confirm what they will do. Also there is usually also someone acting as liaison between the LA and the actual unit.
However from what you have said it would appear that you will not be alone in being a military family looking for school places and as such the LA may decide that they need to stick to the regulations. If they stick with a strict interpretation then they will take all the applications for a particular age group (year 4 for instance) received in the time period and put them in admission criteria order. They will then allocate any available places in each year group. As such they will treat your two children as individual applications and it is not unknown in these circumstances that one gets offered a place and the other does not. There is a legal requirement that the two are treated as separate applications.
In terms of sibling criteria until one sibling starts at a school then the other cannot be treated under this admission criteria. You also need to look carefully at what the admission criteria says because quite often the older sibling needs to be in the school for the younger sibling to be counted under the sibling criteria for admission.

There are extra provisions for service children, so you might want to look at the Admissions Code for those clauses.

Because we are Military we've been allowed to apply from abroad. Luckily we have a proper address that's closer than the unit address.

Thank you for confirming sibling priority won't kick in until September. Hopefully it won't come to that.

Your year 2 child should be able to get in as an excepted pupil even if the class is at 30, because year 2 is under the Infant Class Size regulations, but service children are allowed to take the class above 30.

Your year 4 child is not under Infant Class Size regulations, so the class may be able to go to as many as 32/34. It will depend if any more people joined the class in year 3 as to whether they have the space. If your child doesn't get in, you can appeal on prejudice grounds, which means that you have to show that your child needs the place more than it will make things difficult for the school.