School places: a guide through the minefield of admissions

About 75% of schools may now set their own rules about which children they accept. Here are the 10 most common criteria and how they are used … and abused


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.

It is a minefield for parents that could get worse. So what are schools’ most common entry criteria when they have more applicants than places, and how are they used and misused?

1 Distance Ranking pupils by distance from the school to the front door of their home and offering places accordingly is still the most commonly used admissions criteria. But it has the potential to be abused by parents who move, rent or simply lie about their address on the application forms. Four years ago the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, which has responsibility for investigating complaints about school admissions, reported that fraud was growing and uncovered cases where people were faking marriage breakdowns to bypass the distance criteria.

2 Selection by ability The 11-plus test is still used in 25% of all local authorities, 15 – out of 152 – of which are fully selective. In those areas, children take a selective entry test early in year 6 and get the results in time to know if it is worth applying to a grammar school. Private coaching is rife and some parents spend up to £3,000 a year to get their children through the test. There is even a pecking order within the grammar school sector with “super-selective” grammars, which admit pupils strictly according to ranking in the test results without any distance criteria. These schools take pupils from a very wide area, often at the expense of local children.

3 Partial academic selection Usually overlooked are the small number of schools that have been allowed to continue selecting a proportion of their children. Some of the most high-performing “comprehensive schools”, like Graveney school in London and the Watford boys’ and girls’ grammar schools reserve between a quarter and a third of places each year on this basis. In the case of the Watford schools, these are described as “specialist” places – 35% of the total intake are linked to tests either for aptitude or ability.

4 Aptitude selection Schools are permitted to select up to 10% of each year group by aptitude for sport, the performing or visual arts, languages and, in some cases, design and technology and ICT. The question of testing for aptitude rather than ability (which can be coached for) is controversial. A recent complaint to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator regarding an “aptitude” test for “ICT for business and enterprise” used in a south London academy was upheld after it emerged that questions to test financial knowledge, grammar and mathematical problem solving were included. At the other extreme the Macmillan academy in Middlesbrough was obliged to remove aptitude selection for “outdoor learning”.

5 Catchment areas Old-style “catchment areas”, in which children were expected to go to their nearest schools, went rapidly out of fashion as parent choice took off in the 80s and 90s. But catchments are making a comeback, with some academies and free schools prioritising applicants who live in “priority areas”. The Bristol Free School was accused of flagrantly prioritising more affluent families when it chose a different priority postcode from the school’s own address.

6 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

7 Banding Banding is popular with schools that want to create fully comprehensive intakes as pupils are admitted in equal bands of ability, defined by an entry test. Schools can either participate in a common banding test across one local authority area, which is the case in Hackney in London, or run their own banding schemes. The school admissions code says that banding must be fair, objective and “not used as a means of admitting a disproportionate number of high-ability children, which is illegal”. However there are subtly different types of banding. Bands can be arranged to reflecting the range of ability of the pupils who apply to the school, the full range of ability in the local area, or the full range of ability across the country. These distinctions have the potential to produce different outcomes. A school in an affluent area, which may also have a faith criteria, may run its own test on a Saturday morning after a judicious distribution of the school prospectus and then base bands on the (higher) ability of applicants might end up with a very different intake from a group of schools in a disadvantaged area that band their pupils to represent the spread of ability in the local community.

8 Faith Schools with a religious character were granted exemptions under equalities legislation. This enables them to prioritise pupils from certain faiths and discriminate against those of other faiths or no faith at all. New academies and free schools must keep 50% of places open to non-faith applicants. Faith schools often use supplementary application forms and may award points for different activities such as church attendance, flower arranging and bell ringing. The admissions practices of the high-profile London Oratory school, where Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s son is a pupil, were recently judged by the schools adjudicator to be discriminatory on social and ethnic grounds and guilty of multiple breaches of the admissions code, one of which related to the use of points for “religious activity”.

9 Founders’ or teachers’ children The coalition government has allowed free schools to prioritise the children of founders or teachers. The West London Free School, founded by journalist Toby Young, changed its admissions criteria after opening to include the former.

10 Feeder schools Some schools give priority to pupils from feeder primaries, which can push the problem of gaming down to the primary level, and also work against parents moving into an area who may not be able to get their children into a feeder school. The admissions code states that the choice of schools must be transparent and made on reasonable grounds.

11 Any of the above used together Perhaps the most complex situation for any parent to navigate is several of these criteria used together. The Grey Coat Hospital school in Westminster, chosen by the former education secretary Michael Gove for his daughter, is one of several high-performing church schools that allocate places according to faith, language specialism, banding and priority parishes. Its admissions policy runs to 12 pages. Unsurprisingly, it has far fewer children eligible for free school meals than its local community and, according to Ofsted, attainment of pupils on entry is above average.

Admissions expert Professor Anne West at the London School of Economics worries not just about the plethora of different admissions criteria faced by parents but also a lack of scrutiny of how schools apply their policies, especially as local authority power over schools wanes. Academies and free schools are answerable ultimately to the secretary of state, and the coalition abolished the statutory council admissions forum, which offered some local scrutiny of admissions. “There needs to be a body with powers to carry out audits on the admissions process,” says West.

At the moment, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator can only respond to specific complaints, so schools flouting the rules may get away with it if no one complains. But even with greater powers, it would need to be backed up by local oversight, according to Alan Parker, who recently stood down as one of England’s 12 school adjudicators. “This is particularly necessary when practice on the ground doesn’t follow the written policy,” he says. “The admissions criteria of the schools within every local authority should be coherent and transparent. Parents ought to be able to list schools in their genuine order of preference and trust the system to deliver the best outcome. They should not have to navigate a maze of complex and conflicting requirements or be made to feel they need to second guess the chance of getting in before filling in the preference form.

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