Oversubscription Criteria
The ranked rules a school uses to allocate places when there are more applicants than spaces.
Oversubscription criteria are the ranked rules a school uses to allocate places when there are more applicants than spaces.
A typical secondary school’s list looks like this:
- Looked-after and previously looked-after children
- Children with a strong medical or social need
- Children with a sibling already at the school (sibling priority)
- Children of staff (sometimes)
- All remaining children, ranked by straight-line distance from home to school
Faith schools, grammars and banded comprehensives have variants. Faith schools may rank religious practice; grammars rank by 11+ score; banded schools allocate by ability band first.
The order is more important than the rules themselves. If a popular school’s top three categories absorb 90% of places, the distance cut-off is irrelevant for everyone outside those categories.
The full criteria for any state school in England are published in the admissions policy on the school’s or local authority’s website. Read it, don’t guess.
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