C
The Catchment
London · school admissions intelligence

Will your address get your child into that school?

Real cut-off distances from official council data. Honest classification of every school type. The actual numbers that determined who got in last year — not heatmaps, not probabilities, not estimates.

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How we classify schools

The most important question isn't wherethe school is. It's how it admits.

Every school is one of five types. Each operates under fundamentally different rules. Knowing which type a school is changes the entire decision.

Council-controlled

Council-controlled

Defined priority area. Inside it, you get advantage. Distance is the tiebreaker within the zone.

1,247 schools
Distance-only academy

Distance-only

No fixed zone. Admission ranked purely by straight-line distance. Cut-off shrinks or grows yearly.

892 schools
Faith school

Faith school

Religious criteria dominate. Distance is a secondary factor. Supplementary form usually required.

486 schools
Selective grammar

Selective grammar

Test-based admission. Distance often irrelevant beyond a tiebreaker among qualifying candidates.

39 schools
Independent

Independent

Fee-paying. Own admissions process, often including assessment days and interviews.

463 schools
72%
Primary schools covered
1,300 of 1,799 London primaries
77%
Secondary schools covered
386 of 501 London secondaries
13 yrs
Historical cut-off data
May '26
Last data refresh
Auto-extracted from council PDFs
What we do
  • Extract last-distance-offered from each borough's annual allocation PDFs
  • Classify every school by admissions type with the criteria that matter
  • Show 3-year trends so you understand catchment direction
  • Cite every data point with its source document and date
What we don't do
  • Predict admission outcomes — we show history, you make the decision
  • Rank schools by quality — Ofsted ratings are linked, not editorialised
  • Recommend property purchases — we are not estate agents
  • Hide what we don't know — uncertainty is surfaced, not buried