School places: a guide through the minefield of admissions

This time next month the open days will be over, the forms dispatched and the anxious deliberations about which secondary school is best for thousands of children over until next spring’s offer day. It is over 25 years since the idea of “choice” was firmly established in the minds of parents. But in some ways the task of exercising that choice is harder than ever.

Whereas once parents had to choose between local authority schools and a minority of faith schools, each of which allocated places in broadly similar ways, now the education landscape is dotted with academies, free schools, foundation and trust schools, city technology colleges, university technology colleges and studios schools, all of which have the freedom to set and manage their own admissions criteria.

The proliferation of different types of schools has been so rapid that around three-quarters of England’s secondary schools are now their own admissions authorities – up from around a third only 10 years ago.

They may not all use the freedoms available to them, and the school admissions code should regulate what is now an active market in many places. But it is possible for parents to be faced with a range of local schools, all of which have very different ways of allocating places – especially as the pressure of the performance tables has led to some schools finding ingenious ways of using their freedoms to improve intakes.

Research by both the Sutton Trust and the Fair Admissions Campaign suggests that many of England’s most successful schools have intakes that are very different from their local communities. And a recent survey by the pressure group Comprehensive Future found that in some parts of the country up to 80% of schools have some sort of selective entry criteria……

Lotteries Places are allocated by a computerised random allocation programme once a school is oversubscribed. This makes it hard for parents to game the system by moving or renting close to popular schools. After a contentious start, the lottery is now well established in Brighton (where it is linked to priority admissions areas). It is being heavily backed by the Sutton Trust as one of the fairest ways to offer equal access to good schools….

Read the full article here