Admissions

Admissions by year group: seats, waiting lists and siblings

“Is there a place in Year 6?” In most schools that question has no answer: it has a person.

8 September 20266 min readBy the GEERD team

A school that chooses its pupils does not run an admissions campaign. It runs eight, twelve or fifteen of them: one per year group. Each has its own seats, its own waiting list, its own calendar and rules that are not those of the year group next door. In Reception, twenty-four pupils are kept and sixty turned away. In Year 12, two are kept, if two families move away, and in some years none at all.

From the outside it is all one admissions process. From the inside, these are different jobs sharing a single file. And that file knows how to hold a list of names. It does not know how to hold a rule.

What each year group has of its own

Four things, none of which can be inferred from the year group next door, and none of which fits in a column.

A capacity, which is not the size of the class

An available seat is the maximum roll, minus the pupils moving up, minus those leaving, plus those whose return is still unknown. So it only truly exists once re-enrolment is known: in a school, admissions and the new year are one subject seen at two moments.

A waiting list, which is a promise

A family on a waiting list has been told something. Are they ranked, or simply held? How long do they stay on it? Who tells them when a seat opens, and within what time? A list with no answers to those questions is a pile of files nobody dares throw away.

A sibling rule, which cuts across every year group

Sibling priority is the one rule that belongs to the family rather than to the year group: it applies inside every queue without being defined by any of them. And “priority” is anything but obvious. Priority at equal merit, or exemption from the interview? Valid after the deadline? On a full year group? Until those sentences are written, everyone completes them their own way.

A calendar that never closes

One family arrives in November, another leaves in February. The year group that was full in May has a seat in January, and nobody is telling May’s waiting list. A school runs one campaign per year group, and a permanent admissions process on top.

The same question, two answers

On the left, what a tracking file says by itself. On the right, what it would say with the rule written beside it.

The question	What the spreadsheet answers	What a written rule answers
Is there a place in Year 6?	Twenty-eight rows out of thirty.	Two seats as at 12 March, one held for a sibling until 30 April.
Does this family have priority?	There is a brother in the school, somewhere.	Yes: a sibling re-enrolled, priority at equal merit, no exemption from the interview.
Who tells the waiting list?	Whoever had the file open that day.	The year group’s owner, within 48 hours of every withdrawal.

The rule ends up in one head

None of the above is complicated. Each rule fits in a sentence, and the school has been applying them correctly for years. What makes them fragile is that they are written down nowhere: they are arbitrated case by case by the person who has run admissions for ten years, and she arbitrates well. The file holds the list; she holds the rule.

Every school knows the consequences. Two weeks of leave in July during which nobody can confirm a seat. A family given a different answer depending on which colleague picks up. And the day that person hands over, she is not handing over a file: she is handing over ten years of judgement, in three days.

Write the rules once

Half a day, once, then the same half day read back each year before applications open.

01Count the seats per year group, with a date
A seat count is only true on a date. Write it that way, “Year 6, three seats as at 12 March”, and name the person who keeps it current. With no date and no owner, the figure is back to being an estimate within a fortnight.
02Write the sibling rule in full
One sentence for what it grants, one for what it does not. “A sibling has priority at equal merit” still says nothing about whether that priority survives the deadline, or what happens when two sibling families want the same seat. Both cases come up every year.
03Decide what your waiting list is
Ranked or not, until what date, what a family is told when they join it, and who calls when a seat opens. Write it in the words you will use on the phone: that is the best test a rule can be given.
04Give every file the same fields
Year group applied for, sibling in the school, date received, status, owner, decision date. Six fields, filled in the same way by everyone, are enough to answer without opening the file. This is the work BrightStep does: your fields, your tags, your saved and shared views, one per year group. It does not count your seats and does not rank your lists: those are your rules, applied by your team; it makes their state legible without anyone having to ask a person.
05Decide who answers, and how fast
A family asking whether a seat is left compares your reply time with the school down the road before they compare anything you teach. Naming who answers is as much part of the rule as the seats themselves.

Five sentences to complete this week

Take one year group. The ones you cannot finish without calling someone are precisely the point.

In Year 6 we have ___ seats as at ___, and ___ is the person who keeps that figure.
A sibling has priority when ___, and stops having it when ___.
A family stays on the waiting list until ___, and we contact them ___.
An application received on Monday gets an acknowledgement on ___ and a decision on ___.
When a seat opens in January, ___ decides who gets it, by applying ___.

What to take away

A selective school does not have an application-tracking problem: it has an unwritten-rules problem. Seats, waiting lists and sibling priority are leadership decisions, not calculations. As long as they live in one head, the school answers well, but only when that head is there.

Written down, the same rules become legible to the whole team, workable on a Monday in August and defensible to a family. What we know how to do is go back through a campaign with you, year group by year group, and show you where the rule was missing.