Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Heads-up, I hope you have all had a nice productive week.  

I would like to take this opportunity to tell you about some of the latest developments with Warwickshire’s School Admissions Service.  

Following on from the success of last October’s Local Area Workshops for Warwickshire’s Elected Members, the Education Sufficiency and Admissions Team will be holding further sufficiency workshops. These are planned for March and aim to give Members a greater insight into sufficiency and place planning options in their local area as well as providing further information on the schools admissions service and related processes more generally. 

The national deadline for Reception and Year 3 Junior School applications was the 15 January and we’ve been busy making sure those families with pre-school or Year 2 children at an infant school were aware of the deadline and had all the information they needed to make an application. Those that have submitted their application by this date will receive their school offer on National Offer Day (19 April 2022). At the last check, we had received 6231 applications for Reception and 1297 for Junior places, which equates to a total of over 15,000 preferences. 

As you will be aware, the next significant date for school admissions is the 1 March, which is National Offer Day for those families with children starting in Year 7 this September. This year we received applications from 8,594 children and we also managed the 11+ testing process for 3,371 children. 

Finally, just an update on the DfE Fair Access Process Consultation. Following the publication of a new School Admissions Code, we have been revising the Warwickshire Fair Access Protocols to incorporate the new Admissions Code regulations. This will be shared with you all early next month and we hope that it will be formally adopted by April of this year. 

Best wishes

Matt Biggs

Education and Early Years Strategy and Commissioning Manager