Catchment Area

A catchment area is the geographical area a school prioritises in its admissions policy.

In practice, two very different things get called "the catchment":

• A defined catchment drawn on a map - the school’s policy explicitly gives priority to applicants who live inside it. Common for faith schools and some grammars.
• An effective catchment - the area from which applicants successfully won places last year. For most community schools, this is just the radius covered by that year’s distance tie-breaker.

The effective catchment is not legally defined and changes year to year. It depends on how many applications the school receives, how many sibling places were used, and whether higher-priority categories filled most seats.

Always check the last offer distance for several recent years rather than relying on a single estate-agent figure. On FavSchools we publish the historical cut-off for every school where official data is available.