School admissions – Best ways to improve the process

At Access Synergy, we know and understand it's vital the school admissions process runs seamlessly. Our admissions portal helps by automating stages to enable faster decision-making to avoid the increase in appeals.

By the end of this article, all questions about how to improve school admissions processes will be answered including improving communication with parents, caregivers, and the schools themselves, as well as the best ways your local authority can deliver their responsibilities so no child is missing from education.

School Admissions 2024 – What are Local Government’s responsibilities?

Local authorities are crucial in managing school admissions, whether for primary or secondary schools. Various pieces of legislation govern their responsibilities to ensure school places are allocated fairly and timely.

1. Ensuring Adequate School Places

Local authorities are responsible for setting policies and catchment areas for community schools. For faith schools, foundation schools, academies, and free schools, the schools themselves set their own policies and catchment areas. However, local authorities must collaborate with these schools to meet the demand for new secondary school places each year, which can be particularly challenging with the rise of academies.

The School Admission Code, issued under Section 84 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, outlines mandatory requirements to ensure school places are allocated fairly. It mandates that all admission arrangements must be transparent and equitable. When a school is its own admission authority (such as an academy), the governing body or Academy Trust is responsible for compliance with this Code.

2. Setting Policies and Deadlines

All schools are required to have clear admission arrangements that explain how they will admit students, especially if applications exceed available places. The Code specifies who sets these policies:

The code makes clear Admission arrangements must be reviewed and determined annually. If changes are proposed, they must be consulted on for a minimum of 6 weeks between 1 October and 31 January of the preceding school year. If no changes are proposed, consultations must still occur at least once every 7 years.

3. Coordinating Admissions

Local authorities must also coordinate these applications. They need to make clear deadlines for admissions, with primary schools normally being due by the 2^nd week of January and secondary schools by the end of October.

At this point it is then the responsibility of the local authority to coordinate these applications, sending out offers on National Offer Days: 1st March for secondary schools and 16th April for primary schools.

The local authority also must manage both undersubscribed and oversubscribed applications. For undersubscribed schools, every applicant must be offered a place. For oversubscribed schools, applications are ranked according to the school’s oversubscription criteria, and the local authority communicates the reasons for the offers made to parents. Appeals may arise from these decisions, which the local authority must also handle.

4. Managing Appeals

When managing appeals the admission authority must provide the parent or carer with the following information:

• The reason for the refusal
• Information on how to appeal
• The deadline for lodging an appeal
• Contact details for submitting the appeal

Parents are then required to submit their grounds for appeal in writing, and admission authorities cannot restrict the reasons for which an appeal can be made.

This system ensures that school admissions are conducted fairly, and transparently, whilst following legislation.

School Admission Process – How does it work?

For school admission processes to work effectively there are multiple steps and responsibilities for different stakeholders. Depending on the type of school the process can differ. However, the table below breaks down a more generalised school admission process.

School Admission Challenges

As discussed, local authorities have a lot of responsibilities in terms of managing, coordinating, and creating policies for their admissions process.

With that and lots of types of schools having different admission authorities, comes with many challenges which your local authority may already be aware of or are already experiencing.

These challenges can be categorised by level of education, demographic, policy, logistical, and administrative. The list below demonstrates some of the most common challenges local authorities can face:

1. Rising Demand for School Places

One of the most common challenges is managing the rising demand for both primary and secondary schools. Often an increase in demand can lead to high demand in specific areas leading to overcrowding, making it difficult to offer places to all applicants within the catchment area.

In some instances, local authorities and schools have had to work together to change the distance of their catchment areas to smaller areas to prevent overcrowding.

2. Capacity and Infrastructure

To cope with the rising demand one of the suggestions is to expand existing schools or build new ones to accommodate the rising numbers.

However, this isn’t an immediate fix and takes time, significant planning, and financial resources. Equally in many urban areas, often schools are limited in their space restricting their ability to expand.

3. Policy Coordination

With lots of different admissions authorities depending on the type of school, another issue for local authorities is being able to coordinate admission policies. This can often be complex, especially when it comes to secondary school admissions.

Frequent changes in government policy can also create uncertainties which require rapid adjustments to local strategies.

4. Special Educational Needs (SEN) Provision

Another key issue that local authorities have to address is ensuring adequate provision for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND needs within mainstream schools. Often this can be challenging due to limited resources and a lack of specialist staff.

5. Managing parental preferences and appeals

With increasing demand, there is increased competition, and popular schools often receive more applications than they can accommodate leading to disappointed parents and a high number of appeals which equally take a lot of time and resources.

6. Transition from primary to secondary

One of the final challenges that local authorities have to manage is the transition of large cohorts of students from primary school to secondary school. Local authorities have to ensure sufficient secondary school places are available.

It is key that local authorities manage these feeder-school relationships to ensure smooth transitions, this isn’t always easy and can be complex.

Additionally, considerations around transport to get to secondary schools need to be considered as well as transitional SEN transport from primary to secondary schools.

School admission – How to improve the process?

Like all local government services, they are being encouraged to digitally transform them to achieve digital maturity and gain better outcomes. Educational services are no different.

By investing in digital tools local authorities can significantly improve the management and coordination of school admissions across all the stakeholders involved.

Having a platform that holds all the information in one place helps improve communication and collaboration within the school admission process. Equally, it also manages demands to help avoid disappointment from parents and subsequently reduce the number of appeals that must be dealt with.

Digitally transforming the school admission process therefore can offer many benefits for local authorities including:

1. Streamlining the process – Using online forms and portals reduces paperwork, eliminates the need for physical visits, and allows for easier submission and tracking of applications.

2. Improves data management – Helps manage large volumes of data and centralises it making it easier to make informed decisions and reduce errors associated with manual data handling.

3. Enhances communication – Digital tools facilitate better communication between schools, local authorities, and parents. Here automated notifications, reminders, and updates can keep all stakeholders informed about the application deadlines required.

4. Efficient allocation of resources – Advanced analytic digital tools can help predict student enrollment trends to identify demands and optimise them accordingly. This, in turn, can help plan for classroom sizes, staffing, and facility needs to prevent overcrowding.

As a result, this can ensure that the admissions process is transparent and fair to minimise bias and ensure that admissions criteria are applied consistently, providing clearer information to parents on how decisions are made.

5. Integration with other systems – Investing in digital tools allows more opportunities to integrate with other educational systems including student records and financial aid systems, to help provide a seamless experience as these integrations ensure that all relevant information is considered during the admission process.

How can Access Synergy help improve your school admission process?

At The Access Group, we know that it is essential that your local authority can effectively manage its rising school admissions every year.

We know that local authorities want to find new ways to make this process simpler and more efficient.

Access Synergy offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to revolutionise the school admission process for all stakeholders across the school admission process.

By integrating multiple functionalities into a single platform, Access Synergy enhances efficiency, reduces costs, and improves overall service quality.

For local authorities, Access Synergy streamlines the administrative data to automate many aspects of the admissions process. As a result, local authorities experience a reduction in their manual data entry to enable faster decision-making.

This automation translates into cost savings, as less time and fewer resources are spent on paperwork and postage. According to recent data, Herefordshire Council saved approximately £30,000 in a single year by cutting down its admissions administration by 30%, highlighting the financial benefits of implementing Access Synergy.

Access Synergy can also integrate seamlessly with existing legacy systems to ensure a smooth transition without disrupting current workflows. This helps to simplify the management of school capacities, applications, appeals, and placements which are all centralised in one accessible platform.

For more information on how Access Synergy can help streamline your school admissions download our brochure today.

Summarising the best ways to improve school admissions

This article has reviewed how school admissions work and what the responsibilities are for local authorities. By reviewing the responsibilities of local authorities within the school admission process this article has evaluated some of the key challenges local authorities are faced with annually.

By investing in digital tools and digitally transforming the process local authorities can save time, money, and streamline the process, by having one centralised place where all the information can be stored.

Access Synergy integrates with multiple functionalities as well as legacy systems to make both the process and the transition from one system to another seamless.

Here we help by automating many aspects of the admission process to avoid duplicated data, the reliance on paper or manual processes, and time spent managing significant numbers of appeals. Instead, our admissions portal helps make faster decision-making, offering multiple benefits for all stakeholders involved.

In the last year alone we processed over 477,000 primary and secondary school admissions across 60 local authorities.

Find out more today by contacting us and we can show you first-hand the best ways to digitally transform your school admission process.