Confused about schools and church

[Pastnowfuture]

My son is only 18 months but a few people have asked me what school I would like to send him to. When I responded to this question today with my usual answer 'name of local non-religious school' I was informed that I'm unlikely to get him in as it's rated outstanding and there is a big housing estate right next to it where people buy to secure a place. It turns out this person is the assistant head there. She also told me that last year over half the places were taken by siblings.

The only other options within 25 minute walking distance are 1 Catholic school (outstanding) and 2 C of E schools (good), all of which a quick internet search tells me are oversubscribed. The online criteria says families regularly attending church for 2 years before applying will be prioritised.

I'm now worried we won't get a place at any and will have to take the bus to school in a different town. I had no idea this was a thing. We just went to the closest school growing up. It may sound silly but I'm worried about how I will get to work on time and the cost of the busses, plus how tired my little boy will be with the extra travelling time (about 40 minutes x 2).

I feel like my only option is to start going to church but it feels morally wrong. I was brought up Catholic but have no intention of returning to the Christian faith. Am I missing something? Is this common?

As you can see, admissions for faith schools vary considerably. In my local area, the two Church of England schools have completely different policies and the catholic school is different yet again.

Don't listen to any advice on here and look up with the admission criteria is for the specific schools you'd like to attend. Some church schools allocate 50% on distance, 50% on faith etc so you may be worrying about nothing.

If it came down to it, I wouldn't do a 40 minute commute to primary school on the bus so at that point, I'd start considering alternatives like moving potentially.

At 18 months you don’t need to worry yet the situation could well change before it’s time to decide on schools.
Don’t be too worried about “oversubscribed”. That just means that more parents put it first choice than there are places. Some of those parents would have realistically very little chance of getting in due to distance or another factor. It could still mean than the number of realistic first choices and places roughly match.

As for the local sought after school - round here it varies enormously year to year due to the birth rate. One local outstanding primary in one year allocated all but one place to younger siblings and local families sending their first to school were in a panic. Two/three years later there were very few siblings accepted and far more “new” families than usual got in.

Btw your local authority should have various stats on their website explaining how many kids get into each school for each priority group.

Actually 18 months is about right to start thinking and researching. Why leave it when it appears a great problem looming?

My girls went to our local outstanding catholic school. They were never baptised, never been to church. But they were low birth rate years. Check your council website to see what catchment you fall under. But if going to church for a couple of years ensures a good education for your child then I’d just do that.

A lot of this isn’t correct each school sets it’s own admissions - I’d contact the local school admission team.

My son has a full EHCP in place until the end of year 6. This means according to both the local secondary schools that he is second in line after lac. You need to look at the situation. All of my children got into the school of choice as we worked around their admission

Speak to your local authority admissions people (or look on the website) and find out for certain what the criteria is for each school, whether they tend to be oversubscribed or not, whether you have a catchment school.

Then you can make a decision on whether you need to return to your faith or not

Definitely check what the local arrangements are.

On our area everyone has one Catchment school. This is a fixed area, not justca circle around the school. Admissions is usually LAC, siblings in catchment, catchment children, out of catchment siblings, other out of catchment. Some of these schools are CofE schools, but living in catchment is higher than church goers out of catchment.
These Primary schools then all feed into a designated Secondary school (which again has a fixed catchment area).

There is also a few Catholic schools which define their own catchment areas, for which church attendance etc is important, leading into a Catholic secondary school.

Sorry I’ve reread it and actually he comes first with an EHCP. In your situation I’d move as close as the crow flies to your chosen school as you can

My daughter attends a CofE school and there is no faith requirement. However it is obviously very Christianity focused (she tells me off because it's not assembly, it's called morning worship!) but I don't mind that at all. It depends show much that bothers you.

Thanks everyone. I will definitely take on board the advice to ask neighbours with children and look at the admissions criteria more closely

It's actually the 2 C of E schools that prioritise regular church attendance. I haven't even looked at the Catholic one as I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that it would be even stricter.

Unfortunately we can't move closer to the school. We bought our 2 bed terrace for £65 grand. It's probably worth closer to £90 now but the estate near our local non faith school is a new build with prices starting around £200 grand! Way out of our budget

At least I have time to look into things. Feel that I was probably very naive in assuming he would just go to the local non-faith school. It's only a 7 minute walk away.

All of the Primary Schools in my area are CofE. There is no faith requirement in the criteria. My DS went to the nearest one and he's never been christened. There is no option to go to a non faith primary here unless you go private. Clearly the admissions criteria is very much dependent on where you live so you need to look up the criteria on the school/LA/academy website for the schools in your area.

@Pastnowfuture

I think you should contact your local authority and ask about where non faith children go. Look at distance to other schools and how do the faith s hooks fill up? Does everyone really go to church or are some on distance? Are they Aided schools? This can make a huge difference.

@Pastnowfuture

Thanks everyone. I will definitely take on board the advice to ask neighbours with children and look at the admissions criteria more closely

It's actually the 2 C of E schools that prioritise regular church attendance. I haven't even looked at the Catholic one as I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that it would be even stricter.

Unfortunately we can't move closer to the school. We bought our 2 bed terrace for £65 grand. It's probably worth closer to £90 now but the estate near our local non faith school is a new build with prices starting around £200 grand! Way out of our budget

At least I have time to look into things. Feel that I was probably very naive in assuming he would just go to the local non-faith school. It's only a 7 minute walk away.

It's worth looking not only at what the criteria are, but how many children are admitted in each category. So for instance the CoE school might have 30 places and categories go: 1 - looked after children 2 - regular church attendance 3 - siblings 4 - all other children by distance

But if their figures for children admitted in the last few years are
1 - 1 LAC
2 - 2 church attenders
3 - 7 siblings
4 - 20 other children and then last distance admitted to was 5km
you will be very likely to get a place

If it's
1 - 1 LAC
2 - 19 church attenders
3 - 7 siblings
4 - 3 other children and last distance admitted was 100m
then it's much more of an issue!

@Pastnowfuture
The local non faith school might have lots of people asking to go there because they don’t want, or cannot get into, the other schools. Just because it’s over subscribed doesn’t mean you are no hope at 7 mins away. You need to find out if children routinely get into this school from where you live. The LA will have this info. Obviously sibling, LAC, medical needs and even staff children might be above you but that doesn’t mean you are not without a chance. But get the actual info.

A member of staff at this school doesn’t run admissions. The LA does. The staff member could be misinformed as they don’t deal with admissions. Oversubscribed might mean very little. Often it’s people hedging their bets. Get accurate info and make plans after that. Schools also enlarge their intake if new houses produce more children. Most parents will expect to have a local school so ask about plans to expand if they are truly not offering local children places. New estate developers have to put money into infrastructure to overcome issues like this. So ask what the LA plans to do .

Don’t send them to Catholic school if you don’t want to raise them Catholic. I do plan to send DD to Catholic school, the requirement is baptism rather than church attendance (thank goodness, because it’s not really a suitable place to take her with the covid rules in place as they have been since March 2020 so she hasn’t been since she was 2!)

The school should list out its admissions criteria in rank order on their websites.
Re C of E schools, you don't usually have to be a practicing Christian I don't believe... I had to look into it because my kids are at our local school which is C of E, and we're not religious. However I have to say its sometimes an issue that I don't like what they're teaching! More of an issue for me than for dc

@Indecisivelurcher
There are two types of CofE schools. Aided schools set their own admission criteria. They must be legal but can include attendance at church. CofE Controlled might not have church attendance as a criteria at all, but it might. So checking is vital. The LA admissions web site should give all the info on community and schools where they deal with admissions. Aided schools usually do their own snd are responsible for administering fairly and legally.

You can find out what the catchment of the local school is and the distance of the furthest admitted child was. It does seem to be a topic of conversation for parents of children between the age of 1 and 4.

There are rare black spots where children have to travel to primary school but the vast majority of primary age children go to local schools.

Just because they are Faith schools does not necessarily mean they are heavy on doctrine or have a specific religious ethos, so do visit and ask. Many Faith schools offer community places although they often prioritise those baptised and practising at local churches or living within certain parish/es. You need to look up the entry criteria for each local school and how places have been allocated historically. Many LA do not have fixed catchments and the distance of last admitted pupil can vary from one year to another. New build estates can particularly change this.

You need to take a considered and steady approach to this as your child has at a least another 2 years before you have to start expressing your preferences for which school you want them to attend. Having said that you do need to start making decisions for the future.
You want your child to go to the local non-faith school, so it is very easy to say that is your first preference. School numbers do change from year to year and more importantly the distance which the last pupil to get in was at from the school do change. You need to check the admission criteria for the school and check that after looked after children and siblings it is around distance and there is no other criteria being given preference.
Even if on investigation you think you have little chance of being offered a place at the school, if it is you top preference then you should put it as first preference.
You then have 3 faith schools and what you need to do is look very carefully at the admission criteria for the schools. The catholic school will give priority to baptised children definitely. The CoE schools could also give priority to those that are regular attenders to church. You need to make a decision are you prepared to bite the bullet and go to church in order to improve the chances of getting the offer of a place. That is only a decision you can make but if you do then I know that you will be in good company with parents that making the same decisions.
You also need to think strategically what other school outside the 4 named schools may be a practical proposition.
In your situation, I would be tempted if you have the potential to put down three preferences to put them down as first priority being the non-faith school, second preference one of the faith schools and thirdly what you consider the best alternate school further out from where you live. You need to spread your chances of getting a place at a school of your choice not a school given to you if none of the other schools can offer a place.

If three-quarters of the schools in your area are faith schools, it's rather unlikely that they are all oversubscribed with people getting in on the faith criteria.
You need to check two things: their admissions criteria, and how far down the criteria they've got in previous years.

You may well find you have something like this:

1. Looked-after children and those with an EHCP
2. Children meeting some faith criterion (which might be baptism, support of priest/minister, regular attendance)
3. Children with a sibling already in the school
4. Others in a particular area There are lots of variations - siblings might come higher up, or they might prioritise CoE then members of other Christian denominations, for instance. Usually within a category, the tiebreaker is distance. Then if you look at the information about last year, it may well turn out that the school admitted everyone in categories 1-3, and those in category 4 up to a distance of 2 miles, say. That will give you an idea of how likely you are to get into each school.

CoE schools vary quite a bit in how much that affects their ethos.

I’ve just looked at my nearest RC primary school admissions document. I’m actually shocked!

1 Baptised LAC

1. Baptised children of teachers
2. Baptised children from catholic families with priestly support
3. Baptised catholic children without priestly support
4. Other LAC children
5. Children of teachers with 2 years service at the school
6. Siblings
7. Children of other Christian denominations
8. Any other children

My initial reaction? Heaven help us! This school gets its budget from the LA.

1-4 are then ordered as to who is nearest to the school!

Some of those categories may have few (if any) children in them. That's why you need to look at how far down the list they usually get, rather than how many categories there are.