School catchment: last distance offered is the number to check

You have found a house, and the listing says "close to outstanding schools". That phrase is doing a lot of work. Close to a school is not the same as getting a place at it, and the agent will not be the one filling in the form in October. Before you fall for the kitchen, it is worth knowing how places are given out, and what the council published about this street last spring.

Is catchment a real thing?

For many schools, not in the way people mean. Some councils and academies do draw a defined catchment area on a map, and living inside it puts you higher up the list. But plenty of schools, particularly in cities, have no fixed area at all. They have oversubscription criteria: a ranked list of who gets a place when more children apply than there are seats.

The order is usually much the same. Children in care come first, then those with an Education, Health and Care Plan naming the school, then siblings of current pupils, then sometimes children of staff or a faith criterion. After that comes distance from home to school, measured either in a straight line or along a walking route, depending on the council. Distance is the tie break that decides everyone else.

So a house can sit inside a drawn catchment and still miss out in a year with lots of siblings.

What is last distance offered, and where do I find it?

Each year the council publishes, for every oversubscribed school, the distance from the school to the home of the last child offered a place under the distance criterion. That is the last distance offered, sometimes called the furthest distance or the cut off distance. It is usually on the council's school admissions page, in a PDF titled something like "allocation information" or "offer day statistics".

It moves. A school might have reached 1.2 miles in 2024, 0.9 miles in 2025 and 0.7 miles in 2026 if a new estate filled up nearby or a sibling bulge came through. Look at three years, not one. If the house is comfortably inside all three, you are probably fine. If it is inside one and outside two, the listing's "close to" is doing the work we suspected.

Applications in England close on 31 October for secondary and 15 January for primary, with offers on 1 March and 16 April respectively. If you complete in November, you apply from the new address; if you complete in February, you may be applying from the old one, and councils check.

Does the Ofsted rating still matter?

Yes, but look at the date. Ofsted stopped giving single word overall grades in September 2024, and since November 2025 it has used a report card with several judgements. A school the agent still calls "outstanding" may have been inspected in 2013 under a different framework, with a different head. Read the most recent report, note when it was written, and check whether the school has since become an academy or joined a trust.

The same habit applies to the GP. Practice lists open and close, and some surgeries have their own catchment for registration. The NHS website shows whether a practice is accepting new patients. Nurseries are simpler: no catchment, just waiting lists, and the good ones can be a year long.

What should I ask?

Ask the seller directly whether their own children got a place at the school from this address, and in which year. It is the single most useful thing they know. Ask the agent which admissions authority runs the school, because an academy trust may use different criteria from the council. Ask the council's admissions team how they measure distance, and from which point on the property. See [ask: questions-to-ask-when-viewing] for the rest.