Processing applications – point age of entry
By 14 November 2025 for secondary applications and 30 January 2026 for primary applications, the School Admissions and Transport Service will have forwarded and received all details of appropriate applications to and from other local authorities and will merge this information into the admissions database.
By 2 December 2025 for secondary applications and 24 February 2026 for primary applications the School Admissions and Transport Service will have forwarded all details of appropriate applications (and accompanying supplementary application forms where provided) to academy, trust, aided and foundation schools in Staffordshire. The School Admissions and Transport Service will then draw up preference lists for all community and voluntary controlled schools by applying the county council’s oversubscription criteria.
Each school which is its own admission authority will apply their oversubscription criteria to all applications and by the 16 December 2025 (secondary schools) and 6 March 2026 (primary schools) will forward a list of all applicants to the School Admissions and Transport Service indicating the rank order in which all children meet the school’s oversubscription criteria along with an indication of which oversubscription criteria apply to each child.
The School Admissions and Transport Service compares the ranked lists from all schools. After applying the oversubscription criteria for each stated preference, where a child qualifies for a place at more than one school, the School Admissions and Transport Service will allocate a place at the parent's highest ranked preference. The child would then be removed from the other school's lists and if there were other children awaiting places at that school the list would be adjusted accordingly taking the next applicant in the order of the oversubscription criteria.
By 9 January 2026 (secondary schools) and 13 March 2026 (primary schools) the initial results of places in Staffordshire schools will be known. These will be shared with other local authorities and exchanged for details of Staffordshire pupils gaining places at out of county schools.
These results are then compared to rankings and a list of provisional offers will be produced.
Local authorities will then repeat the process set out in 23 to 25 and exchange final results on 20 February 2026 (secondary schools) and 1 April 2026 (primary schools).
