What does further distance offered mean?

[Dillydally88]

Hello

Some councils release the results of how school places were allocated last year. There is a column which is called ‘further distance taken at initial allocation’.

My questions are:

1. would this be the furthest distance under the distance criterion? For eg if looked after children are number 1, then catchment number 2, siblings number 3 and distance number 4, would this mean it got to the distance criteria and this is the furthest distance? Or does it just mean this is the furthest distance in any of the categories?

2. some schools have ‘N/A’ under this heading - does this mean no spaces were allocated on distance for that school (eg all spaces were filled under criteria 1 and 2)?

thanks

Yes, it means if they reach the proximity criterion then what is the furthest distance they offered a place to.

N/A could mean they didn’t apply the criterion (undersubscribed/ religious/ selective etc)

Hopefully right - you could ask the Council

As already said, certainly for our council (Glos), it's the furthest distance for children admitted under the "distance" criterion.
"N/A" for us means that category was not applied for oversubscription I.e. there were still places in the school (or I suppose they stopped at a higher category). I've only seen cases where a school still has spaces though, certainly at secondary! One of the columns in the documentation our council releases shows how many places were allocated to each school on allocation day which makes it more obvious.

1. not necessarily, distance may be a tie breaker within a category, if for example they could not accommodate all siblings
2. n/a probably inductees they did not get to that category

Furthest distance is only used in oversubscribed schools, and refers to the last distance that was offered under the oversubscription criteria.

N/A would mean that no pupils were admitted using the distance tie-breaker - it often means that all children who wanted a place were given one, and/or the LA allocated the school to children who didn't request it.

Our council has two furthest distance columns. One is furthest distance on initial allocations, and one is furthest distance after second round.

If it is 'further' I would assume that ithe statement would indicate that subsequent offers were to late applicants who lived nearer to the school than the last on time place offered under that criterion.

Near us the schools that admit primarily on distance will have a distance listed. This is for their distance category, so if they admitted some siblings or adopted children from further away then that wouldn't be included.

Religious schools or grammar schools just seem to say N/A as distance isn't that relevant to their admissions and it would be misleading to publish a further distance without context of what category they were in. They don't tend to publish numbers in each category which would be useful.

If there isn't further explanation somewhere on the individual councils' websites, you could always email the admissions team and ask...?