Oversubscription Criteria Explained

What oversubscription criteria are

Every school sets a published admission number — the maximum it will admit in a normal year — and when more children apply than there are places, it must allocate them according to its own published oversubscription criteria, not on a case-by-case basis. These criteria, and the order they’re applied in, are decided and published by the school’s admission authority (the local authority for community schools, or the school/trust itself for academies, free schools, and voluntary-aided schools) before applications open.

The typical order

Admission arrangements are generally required to give highest priority to looked-after and previously looked-after children. Beyond that, there’s no single national pattern — common oversubscription factors include children with an Education, Health and Care Plan naming the school, siblings, catchment areas, distance, faith-related criteria and selective test outcomes, but the exact order and combination varies considerably by school, and faith and grammar schools in particular can differ a great deal from the more common criteria.

Places are allocated by working down whichever order the school’s own policy actually sets, until no places remain. This is why two children can apply with seemingly similar circumstances and get different outcomes — the criteria, applied strictly in the school’s own published order, are what actually decide it, not general merit or need.

Where to find the actual policy

The version that matters is the one “determined” and published for your child’s specific admission year — not a general description on the school’s website, and not last year’s policy. Admission authorities are required to consult on and publish these arrangements in advance; most publish them on their own website or the relevant local authority’s admissions pages. This is the document to compare against the reason given in your refusal letter.

What this means for your appeal

If the criteria were applied exactly as published, and your child genuinely fell outside them (for example: further away than the last child offered a place under a distance criterion), a policy-application ground usually isn’t your strongest — your case is more likely to rest on the balancing test or another specific circumstance. But if you can point to a genuine discrepancy — the wrong category used, criteria applied out of order, or a version of the policy that wasn’t actually the one properly published — that’s a real, checkable ground.