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Admissions criteria

Southwark Council’s school admissions team coordinates admission applications for all mainstream schools in the borough.

Community schools

Southwark’s community primary schools all have the same oversubscription criteria. The oversubscription criteria is used to determine whether a place can be offered to a child when a school has received more applications than there are places available. Find Southwark Council’s oversubscription criteria for community schools 2025/26. 

Southwark's community schools don't offer school places based on designated catchment areas. The offer of a school place is solely determined by Southwark Council's community schools’ oversubscription criteria and not based on the area that an applicant resides within. As many applications are received from both inside and outside of Southwark, a child may be offered a place at a particular community school in one year. However, as the number of applications received varies, it may be impossible to offer a place at the same community school to another child living on the same road the following year.

For further information on how places were allocated at Southwark community schools for September 2024, view the community primary schools' place allocations by criteria table (xlsx, 20kb).

Non-community schools

Academy, voluntary aided, foundation and free primary schools (non-community schools) are their own admissions authority responsible for setting their own admission arrangements and deciding how pupils are admitted. In cases where a decision not to offer a place has been made, parents/carers will need to contact the non-community school directly for further details.

All admission authorities are responsible for ensuring that their admission arrangements are fair, clear and compliant with current regulations. If you have a query about a particular arrangement, you should raise it directly with the relevant admission authority (for example, the non-community school). If your query remains unresolved and it relates to a Southwark school, email our admissions compliance officer at schools.admissions@southwark.gov.uk.

You can view all Southwark non-community schools' admission criteria from page 27 onwards in the Starting primary school in Southwark 2025/26 brochure (PDF, 2.5mb).

Page last updated: 30 August 2024

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