Grammar school catchment, distance and moving house

Plenty of grammar schools have no catchment area at all. The ones that do cannot use it to stop you applying. Of the verified school records we hold, 143 of 164 carry a summary of the school’s geographic rule that we wrote from its own published admissions arrangements, and 65 of those summaries open with the words “No catchment area”.

So the question to answer is not “am I in catchment”. It is what your address does to your place in the queue at one particular school, and that differs school by school. This guide sorts the geographic rules into the shapes they really come in, using six schools whose arrangements are quoted from the documents they published themselves.

Does a catchment area stop you applying?

The School Admissions Code is unusually plain about this. Catchment areas must be “designed so that they are reasonable and clearly defined”, and the very next sentence says they “do not prevent parents who live outside the catchment of a particular school from expressing a preference for the school” .

A geographic rule can therefore do only two things. It can rank the queue, so that qualified children inside the area are considered before qualified children outside it. Or it can reserve a block of places, so that a fixed number of the intake is set aside for one area and the rest is open. Neither is a wall. What varies, enormously, is how much of the intake sits behind the geography and how much does not.

What shapes does the rule take?

School	Shape of the rule	What it does to your place in the queue
Sale Grammar School	A list of postcodes: M33, plus Trafford residents in M23, WA14 and WA15	Inside, ranked by distance. Outside, ranked by test score after the in-area group
The Skinners’ School	Inner and outer areas with a place split: up to 140 West Kent, up to 20 Outer Area	Both areas are admitted, on different routes, in the same year
Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys	A 9 mile radius, ranking one criterion only	Inside it, high scorers are ranked by proximity; outside it, boys are still admitted lower down
Nonsuch High School for Girls	A circle of 5.25 km from the front door, attached to up to 125 of 210 places	85 places are offered on score alone, irrespective of home address
Colchester County High School for Girls	A priority area of 25 miles, with a continuous residence condition	The priority area rank order runs until 154 places are used; the last 38 go on score regardless of address
Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School	None. The school states it has no catchment area	Distance is the last criterion, reached only once the earlier ones are exhausted

Read the right-hand column and the differences are obvious. At Sale Grammar School the priority admission area is a postcode list, which is the rare case where a postcode genuinely answers the question: the policy names M33, plus Trafford Authority residents within the M23, WA14 and WA15 postcodes, and applicants from outside it are placed in rank order by their test scores after the in-area group .

At Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys the radius does something narrower than it looks. The policy has a criterion for boys scoring twenty or more marks above the pass mark with no distance limit attached at all, then a criterion for boys living within a 9 mile radius of the school who clear the same bar, ranked by proximity, and then a final criterion for every other qualifying boy, ranked partly by proximity again . A family outside the radius is not excluded. It is competing further down a list.

Nonsuch High School for Girls shows the block-of-places pattern at its clearest. Its arrangements set aside 85 places on the basis of the score in the Entrance Test, irrespective of home address, and up to 125 places linked to a circle of 5.25 km from the front door of the school, measured in a straight line . A girl living well outside that circle is competing for the score places on exactly the same terms as her neighbour inside it. Nonsuch is also one of six schools sharing a first stage before any of this runs, and how the Sutton SET works across six schools sets that shared paper out in full.

Is last year’s furthest distance a boundary?

The number parents bring us most often is last year’s furthest distance offered, and it is the one we trust least. It is easy to misread, because it is real, published, and quoted to three decimal places.

Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School publishes both halves of the answer on its own admissions pages. It states flatly that “We do not have a ‘catchment area’”, and then lists the furthest distance that secured an offer on National Offer Day for four cycles running: 10.769 miles, 12.328 miles, 17.666 miles and 11.025 miles . The school adds its own warning, that the distance varies year to year and it cannot predict what will happen in the future .

Nearly seven miles of swing, at a school with no catchment area, in four cycles. Any one of those figures, read as a boundary, would have been wrong in each of the other three years. Our own school pages carry the same discipline in code: a furthest distance beyond fifteen miles is never rendered as a guide, because at that range a school has taken every qualified applicant it could reach and the number describes one family rather than a bar.

The Skinners’ School makes the second half of the point, which is that one school can fill its intake by three routes at once, reaching two very different distances. Its own offer-day page for 2026 entry breaks the offers down by route: 124 West Kent places to boys scoring 372 or higher, furthest 5.474 miles, 16 Governors’ places ranked by score with the lowest at 384, and 20 Outer Area places, furthest 13.921 miles . By the second round in April the West Kent figure had moved out to 8.26 miles and the Outer Area figure to 14.274 miles . A single mileage for that school would describe a route most readers are not in.

Distances published under a score-ranked criterion need the same care. Trafford’s outcomes table records Sale Grammar School as reaching “Some Category 4. Score 373 and above for out of area candidates to 5.907 miles” . Category 4 is the out-of-area group, and the school’s policy ranks it by score with distance separating equal scores . The mileage is where the queue stopped inside a category, not a line drawn on a map.

How is the distance measured?

The Code requires every admission authority to set out how distance will be measured, how the home address will be determined, and the point at the school that distance is measured to . Schools take that instruction in visibly different directions.

Nonsuch measures to the front door of the school . Sale Grammar measures a direct straight line to a pair of grid coordinates, using Trafford’s Local Land and Property Gazetteer . Colchester County High School for Girls reports straight-line distances in miles to three decimal places . Elsewhere the measure is a walking route rather than a straight line: our own records quote “the shortest available safe walking route” in arrangements from Medway to the Wirral, which can move a family several places in a ranking without the family moving at all.

That is not pedantry. If one school measures the walk and another the crow’s flight, the same distance on a map places you differently at each.

Can you move house, and what will a school check?

Nothing in the Code forbids moving, and admission authorities decide their own residence rules. What the Code does say is that an offer must not be withdrawn “unless it has been offered in error, a parent has not responded within a reasonable period of time, or it is established that the offer was obtained through a fraudulent or intentionally misleading application” . It also allows a school to withdraw a place after a child has started, where the place was fraudulently obtained .

School rules then do the real work. Colchester County High School for Girls makes a priority area place conditional on continuously living at the permanent home address in the priority area from 31 October 2026, the local authority application deadline, until the start of Year 7 in September 2027. The same policy reserves the right to ask for a driving licence, a council tax bill and a recent utility bill, to contact the primary school, and to make an unannounced home visit; and it says that where a property is occupied on an informal letting arrangement predominantly to improve a child’s chances, the school may refuse admission or withdraw a place .

Sale Grammar School handles the timing differently and, for a parent, more usefully. A family that moves nearer the school after applying is considered from the address on the original application until after the first round of offers, and the new address counts only once the school has evidence of the sale or the ended tenancy and of the new home. A family that moves further away is considered from the new address with immediate effect .

What should you do next for your child?

Start with the school, never with a radius. Open its determined admissions arrangements, find the criterion that mentions where you live, and read what it is attached to: a rank, a block of places, or nothing. Which test your child will sit and where you live are two separate questions, and the second one has a different answer at every school on your list.

Then find out whether the school publishes anything about last year at all, and read it as a range rather than a line. If it publishes several years, the spread between them is the most honest thing on the page. If it publishes nothing, that is an absence of data and not evidence of an open door, which is the same trap that runs through pass marks, qualifying scores and cut-offs.

Once the test is behind you, geography stops being something you can change and starts being something that ranks you. What happens on results day, and afterwards covers waiting lists and appeals, and the Kent Test, section by section covers the county where inner and outer areas are most common.

Common questions

Do you have to live in the catchment area to apply to a grammar school?

No. A catchment area gives priority; it does not stop anyone applying. The School Admissions Code says in terms that catchment areas do not prevent parents who live outside the catchment of a particular school from expressing a preference for it. What living outside one usually means is that you are considered later in the order, or for a smaller block of places.

Are there grammar schools with no catchment area?

Yes, and there are more of them than parents expect. Plenty of selective schools take any qualified child from any address and use distance only as the last criterion, or only to separate children on identical scores. Several say so plainly on their own admissions pages.

Can I move house after the 11+ exam to get into catchment?

Sometimes, but the school’s own rules decide, not the exam date. Many arrangements require you to be living at the address continuously from the local authority application deadline in October until your child starts, and several say a move nearer the school after the application will not be counted until after the first round of offers. A move further away is usually counted straight away.

Does last year’s furthest distance offered tell me if we are close enough?

Not reliably. It is a fact about one year’s applicants rather than a line the school drew, and it moves with them. One school that publishes its own figures has seen the furthest offer swing by more than six miles across four cycles, and says plainly that it cannot predict what will happen next.

How is the distance from home to school measured?

However the school says it is, and the wording differs more than parents expect. The Admissions Code requires each admission authority to set out how distance is measured, how the home address is decided, and which point at the school it is measured to. That point can be a front door, a main gate or a grid reference, and some schools measure a walking route rather than a straight line.