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We're an independent UK website built to help parents understand school catchment areas — clearly, freely, and without the jargon. Here's who we are, how we work, and where our data comes from.
School Catchment Checker is an independent website with no commercial relationships with schools, local authorities, or government bodies. We have no financial stake in where your child goes to school. We are not a lead-generation service and we do not sell your data. We are a small team of people who believe that accessing clear, reliable school admissions information should not require a law degree or hours spent trawling through council PDFs.
The site grew out of genuine frustration. When researching primary and secondary school options, we found the same experience repeated across dozens of local authority websites: inconsistent formats, outdated admissions booklets, no easy way to cross-reference distances, and no central tool to help families understand their realistic chances of a place at any given school. We decided to build what we wished had existed.
Today the site covers more than 20,000 state school pages across England, 46 city and town catchment guides, a comprehensive admissions guide, and a free interactive mapping tool — all updated regularly from official government sources. We cover primary schools, secondary schools, academies, free schools, faith schools, and grammar schools.
School catchment areas in England are notoriously difficult to understand, even for experienced parents. Every local authority publishes admissions information differently. Some produce detailed interactive maps; others rely on a single paragraph buried in a 60-page PDF. Oversubscription criteria vary significantly between schools, and the "last distance offered" — the figure that actually tells you how competitive a school is — changes from year to year, making historical comparisons difficult without digging through multiple annual documents.
On top of that, schools measure distance in different ways. Most English councils use straight-line ("as the crow flies") distance as their admissions tiebreaker, but some use walking routes measured along recognised paths, and a small number have their own bespoke rules. Some schools measure from the school gate; others from the centre of the main building as registered on the Ordnance Survey database. These distinctions are not trivial — a few metres can be the difference between an offer and a refusal at an oversubscribed school.
The relationship between school catchment areas and property prices adds a further layer of complexity. Research from major mortgage lenders consistently shows that properties within catchment of highly rated state schools command premiums of 10–20% over comparable homes just outside catchment. Parents making property decisions on the basis of school access deserve accurate, current information — not guesswork or outdated estate agent approximations.
We built this tool to make the core calculation transparent and accessible. Enter your address and a school, supply the catchment radius from the council's admissions data, and you will see immediately whether your address falls within that radius. We are clear about what that means and what it does not mean. We are not trying to replace the admissions process — we are trying to make it less opaque for the families navigating it.
We take data provenance seriously. Every figure on this site comes from a named, publicly available official source. Here is what we use and where it comes from:
GIAS is the official Department for Education register of every state school in England. It is the authoritative source for school names, addresses, Unique Reference Numbers (URNs), phase, type, capacity, pupil numbers, and geographical coordinates. We draw our core school database directly from GIAS and refresh it regularly. You can access GIAS directly at get-information-schools.service.gov.uk.
Inspection ratings displayed on school pages are sourced from the official Ofsted data downloads, published under the Open Government Licence. These cover the most recent inspection outcome for each school inspected under the current framework. We update these regularly to reflect new inspection outcomes. Where a school has not been inspected recently — or has been inspected under a previous framework — we note this on the relevant page and link to the Ofsted reports website for the full inspection history.
The "last distance offered" figures referenced in our guides are taken from annual admissions booklets and composite prospectuses published by local authorities. These documents are published under the School Admissions Code, which requires every admissions authority to make its oversubscription criteria publicly available. We link to these original documents — we do not reproduce or modify the data within them. You should always refer to the original council publication or the school's own admissions policy for the most current and authoritative figures.
The map coordinates we use for schools are drawn from GIAS and from the Ordnance Survey. These are sufficient for indicative distance calculations. However, we note clearly on every school page that the precise measuring point used for admissions purposes may differ from the coordinates shown. Some schools measure from the school gate; others from the centroid of the main building. The exact measuring point for each school is defined in its published admissions policy. You should always verify the exact measuring point with the relevant local authority or the school's admissions team before relying on any distance calculation for an actual application.
Our catchment distance tool calculates straight-line distance — commonly called "as the crow flies" — between a home address and a school location. We use this method deliberately because the majority of English local authorities use straight-line distance as their oversubscription tiebreaker when a school receives more applications than it has places.
When you enter an address and specify a radius, the tool draws a circle on the interactive map centred on the school at the distance you provide. Any address that falls inside that circle is within your specified radius of the school. This gives you a rapid, visual way to assess whether your home is likely to fall within the competitive distance range — based on the historic admissions data you supply.
The tool supports up to five schools simultaneously, allowing you to compare overlapping catchment areas on a single map. You can add multiple years of radius data for the same school to visualise whether the catchment distance has been growing, stable, or shrinking. You can also generate a shareable link to send your configured map to a partner, solicitor, or estate agent — no login required and no data stored on our servers.
We are explicit that this is an indicative tool, not a formal admissions assessment. Admissions outcomes also depend on factors the tool cannot account for: the number of EHC plans naming the school, sibling applications, looked-after children categories, faith criteria, specialist provision, and year-to-year variation in application volumes. Use our tool to narrow your shortlist and inform your planning — then verify the detail with your local authority.
We think it is equally important to be clear about what this site does not and cannot offer:
We are committed to keeping the information on this site as accurate and current as we reasonably can. School data is refreshed from GIAS on a regular basis. Ofsted ratings are updated as new inspection reports are published in the official dataset. Where we are aware that data may be out of date — for example, if a school has recently converted to academy status, merged, or closed — we flag this clearly on the relevant page.
Our city and area guide content is written and reviewed editorially. It draws on publicly available local authority admissions information and is intended to give parents a realistic overview of the admissions landscape in each area. We update these guides when new annual admissions data becomes available, typically between October and January each year following the admissions cycle.
We do not publish league tables, composite star ratings, or any ranking that is not grounded in official inspection data or published statistics. We present Ofsted ratings because they are the official statutory assessment of school quality — we do not add our own editorial judgements on top of them. We acknowledge that Ofsted ratings are a single measure and may not reflect every aspect of a school's performance or suitability for any particular child.
If you spot an error — a wrong address, an outdated Ofsted rating, a broken link to a council admissions document, or a school page that needs updating — we want to know. Accurate information matters, and we take corrections seriously. Please use our contact page to get in touch.
We welcome feedback, corrections, and questions. Whether you have spotted outdated information, have a suggestion for a new feature, want to report a data error, or simply want to understand more about how the tool works, we would like to hear from you.
You can reach us via our contact page. We aim to respond to all messages within a few working days. For press enquiries or data licensing requests, please use the same contact form and indicate the nature of your enquiry.
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