OT: Catchment areas, was Webwise "Customer Choice Process"

[Ian Batten]

> You could easily have the first category (after the compulsory ones  
> like children in care) as "siblings", which is highly unlikely to  
> fill the school;

Actually, there have been cases where it does.  One form intake  
primaries, usually.

>
> In catchment of Secondary

Secondaries don't have catchment areas in Birmingham.  Shenley Court  
will accept any application from anywhere in the authority, because  
it's about 20% understrength (special measures following one of  
Ofsted's most vitriolic reports tends to do that to a school).  But  
for all schools the catchment is retrospective: they just keep taking  
children from the list in category then distance order until the  
school is full.

They used to have catchment areas, and they were tightly enforced, but  
the effect was to leave failing schools with a captive audience.  And  
the system could be gamed: I went to a then-desirable primary (now  
struggling for numbers because the people who bought the houses new in  
1963 are still there!) but one girl arrived each morning by taxi from  
three or four miles away.  Her father, a Prof. at the University, had  
clearly got access to the handles of power.

The secondary catchments were a legacy of the 11+, which was abolished  
a year before I moved up: there were an appropriate mix of grammar and  
secondary modern schools grouped together, and the 11+ selected either  
your local grammar, choice of 1, or your choice of the secondary  
moderns.  Since the sixties the system had been changed so that if you  
passed the 11+ you could either go to the local grammar or any comp  
city-wide, with the result that the aforementioned Shenley Court (my  
Alma Mater) was able to function as a grammar school for years,  
because its intake was dominated by people who had passed the 11+ but  
whose local grammar wasn't very good.


>
> Went to linked Primary

Ditto: there are no linked primaries.  My elder daughter's school is  
an extreme case, with 120 girls from 90 primary schools, but her year  
at junior school went to about fifteen different secondaries.


>
>> The question of if the circle moves in or out year on year  tells  
>> you the waxing and waning popularity and the birthrate.  Most   
>> schools' circles are moving out at the moment because 1996 was a   
>> particularly small year in south-west Birmingham.  A few aren't.
>
> I wonder what happens if the circles contract and leave gaps in  
> between?

A theoretical possibility, but not a real one.  Even a wildly over- 
subscribed secondary school like Bournville has several thousand other  
places physically inside the circle of admission.  Several are  
undersubscribed (Shenley, Kings Norton Mixed), several are themselves  
wildly over-subscribed (Kings Norton Boys, Kings Norton Girls).   
Considering overlapping circles and each school has its area  
overlapped by perhaps ten other schools.  From where we live we are  
well inside the circle for one over-subscribed school and on the edges  
for another, but were we so minded there are another four or five  
schools which we could get into without travel difficulties.

>
> Perhaps it has a higher physical density of schools than other areas

Probably.  And I live in the suburbs of Birmingham, where there was a  
lot of house building and school building after the war.   We are  
close to a pair of pre-war former single-sex grammars that became  
single-sex comps in the seventies, three distinct purpose-built  
secondary moderns from the fifties, again now comps (one excelling,  
two less so) and a purpose-built comp of the sixties.  Within perhaps  
two miles there's a pair of single-sex fifties secondary moderns now  
comps, a single sex sixties secondary modern now a city technology  
college, a Catholic mixed comp and several other random schools.

ian