Guide
How to find the school catchment area map for your postcode
Updated
Councils publish catchment or planning areas, usually as a PDF or a map viewer. Finding the right one depends on who the admission authority is.
Talk to a specialist To check catchment area boundaries, the map is the easy part. Ask your admission authority for last year's furthest distance offered, by year group, and you will know far more than any catchment overlay can tell you.
Start with the admission authority, not the map
Gov.uk tells you to contact your local council to find the state-funded schools in your area and the admission criteria for the ones you are interested in. For a community or voluntary controlled school the council is the admission authority, so its map and its criteria both apply. For an academy, free school, foundation or voluntary aided school the school is its own admission authority, and its published arrangements govern even where a council map exists.
What schools have to publish
Schools' websites must include their admission arrangements, including how to apply, alongside the curriculum, behaviour policy, links to Ofsted reports and performance data. That published document is the authoritative statement of the oversubscription criteria, and it outranks any third-party map or property listing.
The map is a plan, not a boundary
A catchment area describes where an authority expects to draw pupils from. It is not a legal entitlement, and gov.uk's admissions guidance does not define the term at all. Where a school is undersubscribed the map barely matters, because everyone who applies is offered a place. Where it is oversubscribed, the criteria decide, and the map is at best a proxy for the distance criterion inside them.