Findaschool.info school catchment mapping tool
I’m taking 6 months away from my day job to look after my son, Archie, who is 6 months old. I thought it might be interesting to share my experiences.
This week we’ve been having some conversations about schooling for our little ‘un. Given that he won’t be going to school until 2016 that might seem a little premature but the reality of schooling in the UK, and especially London, is that unless you plan ahead you might not get the quality of schooling that you would like. For the benefit of those outside the UK I’ll try to explain.
Years ago, where you went to state primary school (ages 4-11) was a simple question of where you lived – schools had defined catchment areas and you generally knew where you stood. In 1988, the process changed to give parents some degree of choice. Theoretically, a parent could apply for a place in any school in the country. The reality, though, is that schools and local authorities still prioritise by distance and the expectation of choice is often replaced by disappointment when parents fail to get their first choice. Added to this is uncertainty – the lack of defined catchment areas means you never have full confidence, even if you live within the expected radius of your chosen school. This problem is particularly acute in London – nearly a quarter of parents last year didn’t get their first choice and many didn’t get into any of their top 6 schools. The problem is likely to get worse with a projected 18% rise in primary age group population in London.
So, this is the environment we find ourselves in. On the face of it, we should be fine – the two nearest schools have had decent Ofsted (UK education regulator) reports and we would be happy with either. The problem is that we’re outside the range of one and just inside the range of the other. The third nearest school is not as strong according to the reports. I’m a big believer in using data to help make decisions so I started doing some research and came across the excellent findaschool.info web site. It maps historical data for UK primary schools to give a visual representation of school catchments (as shown in the image above) as well as providing tables for school performance data (school type, Ofsted grades, performance indicators). It’s a very neat tool and very helpful for parents in my position.
Looking at the data, we’re approximately 600m from our closest school. The cut-off distances (distance of furthest successful applicant) was around 700m. Initially, this was worrying – would the population growth be sufficient to move us out of the circle? A bit of simple maths was the answer – after calculating the areas of the circles I determined that there would need to be a greater than 25% increase in the population density for that radius to drop below the 600m mark. It’s not certain, but I think that’s enough of a margin to give us confidence that we don’t need to move house to ensure he gets into a decent school.
In other news, we’ve had a great time enjoying the Olympics this week – the whole morale of the nation has been lifted. I also found out that I’m now a “Latte Dad” in this interesting article on proposed paternity leave changes in Sweden.
