How schools draw the line
A catchment is whatever the school’s own admissions arrangements say it is. Your postcode district lands in one of three places against a school’s published area, and each one means something different.
Distance is not what would rule you out. It still isn’t an offer: the test and the other criteria decide the rest.
Your district is only partly inside the published area. Check the exact boundary with the school before you rely on it.
Rarely a hard no, but what it means varies school by school. The three patterns are below.
What it looks like in practice: Sutton
Sutton Grammar School publishes its priority area as postcode districts, which is why a postcode can genuinely answer the question there. The school sits in SM1; the green districts are inside its published area, the sand one only partly (the school names a single CR0 sector rather than the whole district), and the white ones are outside it.
What “outside the area” actually means: three patterns
Schools use their areas in three quite different ways, and knowing which pattern your target school follows changes what you should do about it.
Outside means a higher bar
Most places go to the area first; what is left is offered to outside applicants ranked purely on score. Dartford Grammar School and The Judd School both work this way: an out-of-area child can absolutely get in, but in practice needs a noticeably higher standardised score than the qualifying mark.
How standardised scores and qualifying marks work →Outside means no place, in practice
A smaller group of schools treat the area as an eligibility rule in all but name. Newstead Wood School admits within a published 9 mile radius and says no places have historically gone to anyone beyond it, and at Ilford County High School for Boys the council reports only in-area admissions for the last ten years: live outside areas like these and a place is effectively out of reach, however high the score.
Worth checking before a year of preparation, not after.
Some schools have no catchment
St Olave’s Grammar School and Queen Elizabeth’s School, Barnet admit on score, wherever you live. These tend to be the super-selectives: with everyone in the country competing on the same test, the effective bar is among the highest anywhere.
What score a super-selective actually takes →Criteria change year to year. Each school named here has its own page with the published arrangements we checked, and the year we checked them.
Common questions
How does the grammar school finder work?
You enter a postcode. We reduce it to its district, the first half, and compare that against the catchment areas each school publishes. Schools are grouped by whether your district is inside that published area, on its edge, outside it, or whether we have not yet mapped that school’s catchment.
Does being in the catchment mean my child will get a place?
No. Catchment decides who is considered under the school’s distance criteria; the entrance test decides who qualifies, and the school’s oversubscription criteria decide the rest.
Is my postcode stored?
No. The matching happens in your browser. We reduce the postcode to its district to do the comparison, and we never store it, send it to a server, or put it in a link.
Why are some schools listed as not verified?
We only publish facts we have checked against a school’s own published admissions information. Where we have not yet mapped a catchment to postcode districts, we say so rather than guessing at a boundary.
Catchment matters second
Where you live decides which schools will consider your child. The test decides whether they qualify at all, and that is the part you can actually change between now and the exam.