How School Admissions Work in England

You apply to your local council, not to individual schools. Most councils let you name 3 to 6 preferences in order. Every school you name ranks your child against its own criteria, independently. The council then offers you the single highest-preference school where your child qualified for a place.

That's almost everything.

Secondary school (Year 7 entry): apply by 31 October. Offers go out on 1 March.

Primary school (Reception entry): apply by 15 January. Offers go out on 16 April.

Grammar school tests sit before the main application, typically September or early October of Year 6. You have to register separately for these, usually by July.

Miss a deadline and the application is still processed, but only after every on-time application. It matters. Late applicants routinely miss out on schools that would have been available a month earlier.

When a school is undersubscribed (more places than applicants) everyone who applies gets in. That's most schools.

When it's oversubscribed, the school works through its admissions criteria in strict order until the places run out. The typical order is:

1. Looked-after and previously looked-after children
2. Children with an EHCP naming the school
3. Siblings of current pupils
4. Children of staff (at some schools)
5. Faith criteria (at church or faith schools)
6. Distance from home to school

Each school's exact order lives in its admissions policy on the council website. Criteria 5 and 6 are usually the tie-breakers that decide borderline cases.

Most state schools don't have a fixed catchment boundary drawn on a map. They admit by distance: closer wins. The "last distance offered" (the furthest a successful applicant lived last year) shifts every year based on who applied and where.

Some schools do publish catchments. A handful use "priority areas" that override distance. Church schools prioritise faith attendance before distance. Grammar schools prioritise test score, then distance.

If you're moving house for a school, check the school's last three years of "last distance offered" before you commit. A house 0.7 miles away might have been in range last year but not this year.

You'll be offered the highest-preference school that had space. Accept it to secure the place. You can appeal or go on waiting lists in parallel.

Waiting lists are ranked by the same criteria, not by when you joined. A family that moves closer to the school in July jumps ahead of you. This catches people out every year.

Appeals go to an independent panel and are hardest to win for infant classes (Reception, Year 1, Year 2) because of the 30-pupil legal cap. For other year groups, appeals win if you can show the refusal caused serious harm to your child that outweighs the harm another pupil added to the class would cause. Decent appeals are lost because parents argue about the school itself rather than their child's specific situation.

Use every preference slot. Leaving blanks doesn't help: councils can't consider a school you didn't list.

Apply for more than one type of school. Naming one grammar plus three comprehensives is a standard pattern in selective areas.

Check capacity before you apply. If a school has been full for the last three years and you're on the edge of its distance cutoff, you need a realistic backup.

Apply on time. This sounds obvious but a third of late applications come from parents who thought they had another week.