Admissions Policy

Criteria

These are the admissions criteria we use when allocating our school places in a simplified format to make it easy for parents/carers to quickly understand. It is important to see our full admissions policy as well which gives you more detail about these criteria - please see our Admissions Policy below.

Children who have an Education and Health Care Plan (in which our school has been named) are allocated places before we apply our admissions criteria in order.

1. Children who are Looked After (i.e. in care) or who have been Previously Looked After by a Local Authority
2. 10% of available places (for Year 7 only) are allocated to the children with the highest scores in our Modern Language Aptitude Test
3. Children with exceptional medical or social circumstances
4. Children who have an older brother or sister on the roll on the date of admission (but not in the sixth form)
5. The remaining places are offered on a 50% Distance and 50% Random basis (except for Primary Phase and Nursery which does not use Random)

For Year 7 only we use a banding assessment to put all applicants into 5 ability groups of equal size so that we can make sure our intake is comprehensive i.e. that we have the same proportion of children of every ability. We do not select just the brightest applicants. There is no pass/fail mark for our banding assessment. 

After we have divided all the applicants into 5 equal bands, we then apply the admissions criteria shown above to each band. For example if we have 1000 applicants, each band would have 200 children in it. We would then apply the criteria to decide which of the 200 children in each band would be allocated places. We will offer exactly the same proportion of places available to each band. For example, if we have 120 places available, we would offer 24 places in each band.