Confused about the process of choosing...

[obviouslymarvellous]

Sorry if this has been done to death, but we are in the process of choosing a secondary school for eldest ds. My question is this, if we put a school down as first choice and other parents choose another school in same area (but this is heavily oversubscribed and therefore a number of students don't get in), if they potentially live closer would they get preference in our first choice school??? Or does choosing a school as first option come into play...It's not very clear on admissions criteria, and I'm struggling to get my foggy brain around it x

obviously

So in your scenario there are 3 outcomes

1. You get your 'Good' feeder school option. You will never know whether you would have got into the 'Outstanding' school, because if your 1st option gives you a place, that's the only one you see.

1. You get your 'Outstanding' school option. This will happen if your first choice couldn't give you a place, but your second choice could. You will get this place even if thousands of other people have put this school first IF you meet their admissions criteria better than they do.

1. You get neither because neither school can give you a place. Then they go down to school c.

The way I think about it is that initially, you are given a 'yes' or 'no' for every school, completely independently of one another. Then the computer allocates you the school that said 'yes' which was closest to the top of your list.

However, of course, as soon as they allocate that place to you, any other school which gave you a 'yes' now has one more place to allocate, so one more person who previously had a 'no' gets a yes for that school...and so it ripples onwards. Which is why it takes a computer to do all the iterations!