How can I find out if a school tends to be oversubscribed?

[fluffyanimal]

Who would know - the school, or the LEA? Would they give me that information? The reason I ask is that there is a school we are interested in, it is not far but we fall outside the catchment area and I would like to get a sense of how frequently they allot places to applicants outside the catchment area. I am aware of children in our village going to this school so it seems to happen, but I don't know if it's a rarity or not. TIA.

The LA should publish the stats for how many places were allocated vs applications , broken down by the priority criteria. Check out their website under Primary Admissions.

The La is your first port of call. Ask where the furthest child who is not a sibling got in from last year.

In our county, a report is published each year which contains all admissions for the previous 3 years. It's broken down by which category children fall into.

The only thing it doesn't show is any appeals. Try looking on your council's website.

I'd say the school - the Head from our local comp did a talk at the primary school before ours moved up and told us that generally they had 350 apply, 245 of which would get spaces. Luckily he was able to reassure us that any children in the village who didn't get a space would normally be given one on appeal as it was unreasonable that a child within a mile would then have to travel four miles to the nearest school.

I looked at our LEA admissions website a few weeks ago (to gauge how good dd2's chance of getting in on sibling rule were) and it had the stats broken down for every school in the area, including the different criteria pupils were accepted on. Hopefully your LEA might have this information readily available too.

When my dd was in yr5. I phoned the LEA and they were able to tell me the longest distance between the school and the last child got in from their LEA record in the last few years. Of course you need to take in to acc the birth rate each year. I also phoned the schools' admission officers to check if their schools are always oversubscribed and waiting lists situations.

Thanks all, I think I have found what I need on the LEA website, though it only gives the info for one year. I may follow up with phone call.