Last Distance Offered: Why Several Years of Figures Beat One (Year 7 2027)

You have found a secondary school you love, you live a few streets outside where you think the line falls, and the application deadline is 31 October. One number keeps coming up on forums and open-day chats: last year's furthest distance. It is tempting to treat it as the answer, but it is only one year of an annual shuffle.

This post explains what last distance offered really measures and why it moves. It also shows how to read several years of figures for your own postcode before you submit your application.

Where a secondary school is oversubscribed, the admission authority ranks applicants using its published oversubscription criteria. Under the School Admissions Code 2021 (England), those criteria must be clear and objective. Distance from home to school is often the tie-breaker within a category, though not always the main criterion.

The last distance offered is the distance of the final child who got a place on national offer day. School Atlas holds these published figures school by school and year by year for schools in England, where councils or schools publish them: mostly for Reception and Year 7, and for some junior and middle schools' entry years. Coverage varies by council, and we hold none for sixth form, nursery or in-year entry.

There is no fixed answer, because the furthest place offered is the result of who applied, not a line drawn in advance. Several things change each cycle:

• The size of the cohort. A larger local group of Year 6 children means more families competing for the same places.
• Higher-priority applicants. Children in care, children with an EHC plan naming the school, and siblings may all rank above distance. A year with many of them leaves fewer places for everyone else.
• Admission number changes. If a school adds or removes places, the furthest distance can shift sharply.
• Where families put their preferences. A nearby school's popularity can rise or fall, which changes how many applicants reach your target school.

Where a school admits by distance, the furthest place offered moves from year to year. That is the main reason a single figure can mislead.

Imagine you only see last year's figure and it was unusually generous. You might relax when you should not. Or it was unusually tight and you rule out a school you would have had a reasonable chance of getting into. Either way you have misread one data point.

A run of years gives you three things a single year cannot: the range (how far up and down it swings), the direction (drifting outward, drifting inward, or flat) and the outliers (a one-off year that should not carry much weight).

Nobody can promise an outcome, and a distance history is not a catchment boundary. Some schools use a catchment area as a criterion, and some use faith, banding or selective tests, so distance may only matter for part of the intake. Our guide to catchment areas and transport explains how these pieces fit together.

One further point matters for this round. Under the School Admissions Code 2021, schools rank applications without reference to the order of your preferences. Listing a school lower does not make it less likely you are considered for it. What the order does is decide which offer you receive if you qualify for more than one.

The most useful comparison is your own home-to-school distance against each school's history. The admissions distance checker shows, for the schools near a postcode, whether the postcode is inside a council's catchment boundary where one is published, and how its distance compares with the furthest place offered in the latest year we hold. It reads each school's usual entry year: Reception or Year 7 for most schools, Year 3 at a junior school. With a free account it shows the 3 nearest schools that have an offer distance or a catchment map, for one postcode a day; Pro shows every school nearby. It never gives a percentage chance.

School Atlas Pro goes a step further. For your home postcode it shows how often families in your position were offered a place on national offer day: families at your distance from the school, set against its recent cut-offs, who put it first and had no sibling, catchment or faith priority. The figure comes from English admissions records, built on councils' last-distance-offered figures and DfE's first-choice offer counts, and it was tested against offer days the model had not seen. It covers Reception and Year 7 at schools in England where the records allow, and it is never a percentage chance.

National offer day for secondary schools in England is 1 March 2027. If you are not offered your first choice, you can usually join the waiting list, and for the normal admissions round those lists must stay open until at least 31 December of the year of admission (School Admissions Code 2021, paragraph 2.15). Waiting lists are ranked by the school's criteria, not by the date you joined, so positions can move as other families decline places.

If you are refused a place, you have the right to appeal. Appeals in England follow the School Admission Appeals Code 2022. Our guide to school admissions appeals covers how the process works.

With the deadline close, spend an hour on the data rather than on rumour. Start with the admissions distance checker to compare your postcode with each shortlisted school's latest figure, then open each school's admissions history page for the years we hold (depending on the area, the earlier years may be part of Pro). Browse nearby options on School Atlas Explore to build a balanced list, and use the school timeline to keep the key dates in view.

This post uses England's dates. Welsh councils set their own Year 7 closing dates, and Northern Ireland's transfer into Year 8 has its own timetable, so check locally if you live there. School Atlas's last-distance-offered figures are for schools in England.