Do schools get to see preference order - (general nosiness, no reception child)

[DobbinEweInn]

This is purely just out of curiousity, but local school is celebrating that x amount of families have made the school their first choice school.

So do schools get to see the order of preference?

No, they don't.

We knew that x number had made us first choice, but not the ranking order of individual applications.

Yes they do in a way! They know how many have chosen the school as 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Doesn’t mean that those children actually get in though, depends on the criteria

Only after offers have been made, and then only for the pupils offered their school.

Ah I see, that makes sense as thinking about it I've also seen schools with banners stating they're a first preference school etc.

Thank you

Not correct Haskell, throughout the application process once uploaded onto the system we can see the proportion of 1st 2nd and 3rd choices

So what happens with applications where the school has been put down as a preference at all but they get allocated it, does that get identified in some way?

That will only happen when the 1st 2nd and 3rd choices for that child we’re not available but the School in question is the nearest one with spaces left

Do you mean "hasn't been put down as a preference" Dobbin? If so yes, they are known as centrally allocated places. This info is also available to the public here when our LA publishes the stats for how places were allocated for each school - how many applications for how many places, how many fell into each category of that school's admission criteria, and then how many were centrally allocated.

Perhaps in your authority @Alwayswithalacrity. We don't get that (but our LA is utterly dire and the system they use is out of the dark ages)

Yes, I mean when the parent applied on time and has used all allowed preferences but gets allocated a school they didn't put down. Does the school see they weren't on the list of preferences at all?

@Haskell wouldn’t you think all LA’s would be using the same/similar system by now? Ours has been running this program for about 5 years. The 1st couple of years we could just see the children’s main details but then it changed and allowed us to see a pie chart of 1st 2nd and 3rd. Ours is a very small school (PAN 18) and it is handy to assess the possibility of oversubscription Etc

We are told how many 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th preferences we have but don't know individual application preferences. We can now see who has been given a lower preference because they will remain on our waiting list.

No school ever gets to see the individual preference data of anyone who applies or is admitted. They only see summarised data, ie number of people who listed it first, second, third, etc.

@Alwayswithalacrity 18 PAN? we have schools here with PAN of 240! (Primary)

@HandfulofFlowers I assure you, the files we get from LA put what preference we were against the pupils offered. I'm in secondary, doubt that makes a difference though.

We know after they are allocated but it is of no interest to anyone.

@Haskell the school my son is going to has 1 class per year group, the number in reception this year is 16. It's a lovely small school. So glad he got in.