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 (view the dates below), 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.

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 and your child live in Buckinghamshire, we'll email you to tell you if we can make a new offer in a later allocation round. The email will explain what you must do next, including when and how you should respond to the offer (to accept or decline the place).

If you originally applied using the Citizen Portal, offers made in later allocation rounds are not visible on that online portal. Neither are any changes you may have made to the schools in your child’s application. You will not be able to respond to late allocation round offers using the Citizen Portal – you must instead follow the instructions in your offer email.

If an offer can be made to your child at a school that is in a different Local Authority area (a school outside Buckinghamshire), the other Local Authority will tell us. And we'll send you the offer in the next available allocation round.

If you and your child live outside Buckinghamshire, we'll tell your home Local Authority about any offer we can make to your child, and they will send this to you.

Below are examples of the types of new information we can include in a later allocation round.

View the deadlines to provide new information in the table.

For the Re-allocation Round only, we do not process any changes, except for requests to remove your child from a waiting list. All other changes can be considered from the Second Allocation Round at the earliest:

• New applications
• Requests to remove a child from a waiting list
• Changes to the schools in a child’s application
• A change of address (assuming the required evidence has been provided and agreed)
• Evidence to support exceptional medical or social needs (for brand new applications, or where new information is available that was not known when the original application was made). The third allocation round will be the last opportunity for evidence of this type to be considered.

After 23 June later allocations rounds will be held approximately every 4 weeks, or when places are available. We will not routinely provide waiting list positions after this time.

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.