How are School Houses or Colleges decided?

[Trb17]

Random question but DD's future secondary school devides the children on entry into 4 'houses'.

Does anyone here work in a school that does this and if so, how do they divide the children?

Friend and I were trying to think how it was worked out as it's clearly not alphabetical and nor are siblings placed in same house. Many different feeder primaries too. We couldn't think what method would be used?

Is it names in hat or some other method? Just a curious thread...

At my school (many years ago) they went down the register House A, B, C etc. There were 6 houses and each form was split into 3 of them.
My daughter's school recently introduced houses while she was at the school and they had a whole form in one house - not sure what they do for the new year 7s.
Another secondary near us has whole forms in houses and they put siblings in the same one.

When we did this at my old school, it was allocation by things like speech problems, disabilities etc first, then by home language then anything else that mattered like additional circumstances. After that we'd look at making sure it was pretty equal of boys and girls.
The children spent a lot of time in their houses, including some form time and some lessons so it mattered, whereas ABCD might not have worked.

DDs school gets all the kids to fill in forms in summer term with their likes, favourite subjects etc plus a list of a few girls they would like to be with. From that they put together what are intended to be balanced forms, with everyone in the form being on one house. The idea is to try and make sure each girl has at least one of her friends, and the form isn't, say, over heavy with girls who all play netball. Siblings are put in the same form.

DSs school is pretty much the same though siblings are asked if they want to be in the same house. And parents can ask for their boys to be in the same house they were!

At dd's school, it is firstly by family (all siblings are in the same house) then they try and get a good mixture of sporty ones, musical ones, brainy ones, etc based on references or forms filled in by the children of their interests.

Thanks all. I did think there would have to be a method so as to avoid any one house being unbalanced. Will wait with anticipation to see where DD ends up.

I think most of them use a sorting hat! But if you concentrate very hard when being sorted, you can get it to change its mind...

OverAndAbove ... oh let it be true!

My school did it by where you lived. So there was a house that was just boarders (or ex-boarders), one for the people that lived one side of the school, one for the people that lived the others, and one that was basically the oddments.

You didn't move house if you moved area, but if you became a boarder then you did move into that house, however you didn't move out if you stopped boarding because there were slightly less than 25% of the school boarding.

ds school is one class one house, and they are alphabetical.

dds school each class has all 5 houses in it, and they apear to be random!

DS's school splits DC from each main primary school in 4. And they have a no siblings in the same house policy which I've always thought a bit odd!
But basically it's pretty random.

Ours is x number from each primary school will go into each house. Ideally it will be an even number from each school but the houses have roughly the same number of students. Siblings all go into the same house. This is fairly new after parents requested it so they could reuse uniforms for younger children and save some money. The uniforms are different colours for each house.