Catchment areas
Submitted by: Paul Clarke
Describe your idea. How does it work and who does it help?
"Schools finders" are all very well. They show where schools are in relation to where you live. But what prospective parents really want to know is "what's its catchment area?"
This isn't always cut-and-dried, of course; boundaries can be very granular, and 'difficult' addresses may need manual adjudication.
But the vast majority of areas which are not in contention can be mapped. And a 'fuzzy-edges' marking convention would at least show where potential uncertainty might lie.
What information or services do you need?
- Catchment maps
- Boundaries of 'difficult to resolve' areas
- Legal support on disclaimers: if someone spends £450k on a house on the basis of what they understood from the map, and then finds...
Posted by Paul on 02 November 2008 at 10:25 PM
Jenni - completely agree with the difficulty about the realities of selection: my own kids are 3,4,13 and 14 if that gives some insight into how I see this issue!
In some sense, perhaps what I'm trying to drive out here is if there is such a concept as a 'catchment area' at all? It's become such a part of folk mythology that it would be good to open up its reality. And if it turns out that the whole world is a shade of grey, so be it: but that in itself would be a healthier outcome than perpetual rumour and estate agent innuendo about where's in and out...
Posted by Tony Hirst on 21 July 2008 at 05:40 PM
This sort of map can also be useful in public consultation exercises surrounding proposed school closures, for example.
When my local council was consulting about such an exercise, I produced an interactive map with simple circular catchment areas that allowed people to model the closure of particular schools and generate "coverage maps" that showed how much of the area was not within 5 miles of a primary school, for example: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/013580.html
It also strikes me that a heat map could be used to plot travel times within particular catchment areas?
Posted by Jeni Tennison on 21 July 2008 at 04:08 PM
Catchment areas are really complicated. Just because your neighbour's child got into a school one year gives no guarantee your child will the next; it all depends on the number of looked-after children and siblings that have applied and the number of other children in the 'catchment area'. Individual schools can have different priority systems, and of course priorities change from one council to another. So one might use distance-as-the-crow-flies, while another uses distance-along-roads-and-footpaths and so on.
Having said that, in my experience most councils publish PDFs (huzzah!) containing information about the priority system in place for each school, and about the last few years' intakes. These include useful information about whether or not a school has been oversubscribed, the furthest accepted pupil in a given year and the number of siblings or looked-after children accepted each year.
So you could usefully have maps that provide, for each school, information about the priority system that's in place for the school, number of places that there are likely to be, "catchment areas" over the years (illustrating trends), and providing the relevant distance (as-the-crow-flies or on-roads-and-footpaths) from that school to the user's home.
This might also help councils plan better school provision by highlighting those areas where schools have become so oversubscribed that there are "black spots" outside any school catchment area.