How can I check past allocations for a faith school?

[BendingSpoons]

We live very near a Catholic secondary school. It's a very popular school. The admissions is complicated, but essentially they prioritise on faith i.e. Catholic first, then other faiths, then on distance for any remaining places. We would fall in the last category (distance for any others). I am fairly sure our chances of a place are practically zero but I'd like to know past information on how they allocated. We live in a complicated area for admissions (grammar schools, banding tests, aptitude tests, single sex, mixed sex) so we are already considering and viewing quite a few other schools. I don't want to waste my time and a space on the form on a school with such a tiny chance, but I would like to confirm this. I do realise it can vary year to year.

Some families went to the open day last year and reported they said 'we don't just take Catholic students' but I think this is oversimplfying and doesn't mean they have spaces left in the final category. I would rather not waste an evening on an open day of such a long shot. I can't find any information online on how they allocated places. Would I need to email the school? Would it need to be a Freedom of Information request? Our LA publishes good information about other aspects e.g. last distance admitted for schools where that is relevant. I find it frustrating that this information is not available.

You just need to email the school and ask. Ask if you can see the document with actual breakdown of places allocated though. I asked a catholic school and was told ‘yes we have all children in your category a place last year’. We didn’t get a place in our year and I later found out that the office person had probably read the document wrong when she’d informed me as it hadn’t been the case that we would have got a place preciously. It raised hopes unnecessarily.

The LA publishes this information so check the primary school applications area of its website.

For schools that are their own admissions authority, this is not always the case; especially faith schools. If it's not on the LA site, you would need to request it direct from the school. Also, not all LAs publish the data in detail as routine.

Thanks all, looks like I will need to email the school and be very clear in what I am asking. My LA is generally very good with school admissions information e.g. having a list each school and what year group they have places that gets updated each week, but they don't have this information. They just list the last distance offered for each school, which is N/A in this case. I feel they really should share this to avoid false hope.

I expect the fact that last distance offered is N/A means that no one was allocated under the final group (distance only) but definitely worth asking the school

Yes that is how I'd read it too, that there is nothing to report under this category because all places were offered to higher categories

I found this exact type of information out from a Catholic school for a fellow parent
there were 8 categories in the over subscription criteria and category 8, the last, was non catholic children without a sibling so based on distance
the school were able to give me the number of children in category 8 allocated a place in the previous 4 years
hope this helps with wording your request

so identify the category you fit into then ask for that allocation information

I was told that the statistics are from offers day only and don't include children coming from the waiting list so "last offered distance" could be really different if they updated those stats for May/June

Whilst it sounds logical that no places were given under the distance category, as it says N/A, I don't think this is certain. There is a primary school near us that offers 50% of places on distance and 50% on church attendance, and they also have N/A under last distance offered. This is presumably not to confuse people, but it makes it hard to know your likelihood of a place.