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.
Check your catchment 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.
Question 1
Where do you live?
School admissions are devolved. The body you contact, and the guidance that binds it, differ across the four nations.
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Start with the admission authority, not the map
Gov.uk says to contact your local council for your area's state-funded schools and their admission criteria. For a community or voluntary controlled school the council is the admission authority, so its map and criteria apply. An academy, free school, foundation or voluntary aided school is its own admission authority: 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 it. At an undersubscribed school the map barely matters: everyone who applies is offered a place. When oversubscribed, the criteria decide, and the map is at best a proxy for their distance criterion.