Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the average ratio of applicants to places was in (a) academies, (b) free schools, (c) comprehensive and (d) grammar schools in each of the last seven years.

The Department publishes figures annually on the applications and offers made for a secondary or primary school place through the coordinated admissions process. Offers are made on the respective national offer days of 1 March (secondary) and 16 April (primary). We do not collect the total number of places in a school at the time applications were made and so the number of places offered by schools are attached.

Summaries at national and local authority level from 2011 onwards are published on the Department’s statistics website: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-school-applications.

However, information on primary level preferences is only included from 2014/15 onwards. This is when the Department started collecting data on primary applications and offers, based on the newly introduced national primary offer day of 16 April (or next working day). In 2014/15 the collection for secondary schools was revised to allow the production of school level figures.