Guide to moving up to secondary school

On National Offer Day, most Buckinghamshire schools are full.

Some vacancies may be created if families decline the school offered to their child. We have later allocation rounds to fill these places.

For your child to be considered in a later allocation round, their name must be on the waiting list for the school(s) you are interested in.

Before each published allocation round, we will tell you your child’s position on the waiting list of their preferred schools: you will be given the option to remove your child from the waiting list (by a given deadline) if you no longer want them considered for a place.

On the publication date for each allocation round, we will contact you if we can offer a new school to your child. You will need to respond to the offer by a given deadline.

We must take away any existing school place your child has before we can offer a new school in a later allocation round. You will not be offered the choice between two schools. If your child is on a school’s waiting list, we assume you would prefer that school over the school your child has been offered (even if you have accepted it). If you are happy with the school your child has been offered and do not want a different school, you must contact school admissions to remove your child from any other waiting lists.

If you live outside Buckinghamshire and your child is on the waiting list for a Buckinghamshire school, we will tell you and your Local Authority if we can offer a place in a later allocation round.

Other Local Authorities will tell us about any offers they can make for Buckinghamshire children. These offers will be included in our next scheduled allocation round.

After 24 June later allocations rounds will be held approximately every three weeks, or when places are available. We will not routinely provide waiting list positions after this time.

Here are examples of the types of information we will consider in each allocation round. The deadline to provide this information is set out in the table above.

• new applications
• requests to remove a child from a waiting list
• after the re-allocation round, changes to the schools in a child’s application
• after the re-allocation round, a change of address (if the required evidence has been provided and agreed by the deadline)
• evidence to support a new exceptional medical or social needs application (for brand new applications, or where new information is available that was not known when the original application was made). The latest opportunity for an exceptional medical or social needs application to be considered, will be in the third allocation round.

We will disband Buckinghamshire school waiting lists after the third allocation round, and you will be required to add your child back onto your preferred school waiting lists, if you still wish for your child to be considered.

It is sensible to wait until after Transition Day has taken place at your offered school (if applicable) to tell us if you still want your child to be included on a waiting list – often children find that they are happy with their offered school when they have taken part in this event.

We will then offer any further places over the summer if/when they become available. There are usually very few places that become available at this stage in the year.

By this point, there may have been successful appeals for many schools: the Independent Appeal Panel have the authority to grant places to children even if a school is full, which pushes schools over their planned admission number. This means that we will have to wait until enough offers are declined for the school to have places again before we can make any more offers.

Waiting lists are held – either by Buckinghamshire Council or by the school directly - until at least 31 December of Year 7.

Grammar schools have their own qualification periods for waiting lists so you should check admissions policies for more information.