YEAR 7 ADMISSIONS
Admissions policy
The West London Free School is publicly funded and non-selective. There are 130 Year 7 places available at the school each year. We offer up to 12 places for children with musical aptitude and, in accordance with the School Admissions Code, priority is given to children with education, health and care plans, and looked after children or children who were previously looked after. We want to ensure that the school serves local families and, after we've allocated places to music scholars, statemented children, children with PPG, siblings and feeder pupils from the West London Free School Primary and Earls Court Free School Primary, the remaining places are offered by lottery within a two-mile radius of the school.
The admission arrangements of the West London Free School fully comply with the School Admissions Code. Applications for a Year 7 place in September 2025 can be made from 1st September 2024 until the closing date 31st October 2024.
The admissions policy for September 2025 can been seen here.
Application process
The application deadline for Year 7 places in 2025 is 31st October 2024. Applicants will be notified whether they are successful at the beginning of March 2025. For further information regarding musical places, please see the Music Aptitude page.
Applications received after the closing date of 31st October 2024 but before midday on 15th December 2024 will be treated as on-time applications in exceptional circumstances and entirely at the discretion of the Chair of Governors and the Headteacher acting together on behalf of the school's governing body. To be treated as on-time applications, they need to be accompanied by written evidence of exceptional medical, pastoral or compassionate grounds for doing so. Otherwise they will be treated like late applications and will be added to the Waiting List after 31st August 2025. Applications received after midday on 15th December 2024 and before midnight on 31st December 2024 will also be added to the Waiting List after 31st August 2025 and will be considered for any vacancies occurring during the period 1st September to 31st December 2025.
Those applicants who applied on time (and those applicants treated as such) but not offered places at the beginning of March 2025 will be placed on our Reserve Lists. (The order of the Reserve Lists will be determined in accordance with the order determined by the over-subscription criteria.) Any places not taken up by those we initially made offers to at the beginning of March will then be offered to applicants on the Reserve Lists in a second wave of offers...and so on. This process continues until all the places are filled. Only if all the places haven't been filled by 31st August 2025 will we make offers to applicants on our Waiting List. For more details on the admissions criteria applied to those on the Reserve List and the Waiting List, see our 2024/25 admissions policy.
Secondary Transfer, September 2024 – Reserve Lists on Offer Day
Any applicant who was in the top 50 on any of the reserve lists on Offer Day was notified of their position on that list on Monday 4th March 2024. Those who were positioned any lower than No. 50, were highly unlikely to be offered a place and were not contacted.
For further information, please find attached here a selection of the most regular questions and answers relating to secondary transfer and the reserve lists.
Appeals
If the West London Free School is oversubscribed, its published admissions criteria are used to decide the order in which applicants will be offered places.
If you wish to appeal, please use this link to complete your appeal online. Please do NOT use ANY other appeal form or send your form to your local authority. It is suggested that you download the explanatory booklet about appeals which you should read before you complete the appeal form. Booklet Link
Timescale for parents to lodge their appeals:
By 4.00pm on Tuesday 2nd April 2024 to guarantee that your appeal will be heard in the first tranche of appeals. Appeals lodged later may not be heard until the second tranche which could be in September 2024. You MUST state the reasons for your appeal and supply any documentary evidence at this stage.
Appellants will be set a deadline to submit additional evidence and for the clerk to send papers to panel and parties. Decision letters will be sent out within five school days of the date of the last appeal to be heard.
Please see here for the full timetable.
The Common Application or eAdmissions Form
Some parents who think they'll only be eligible for a lottery place at our school - which is not a musical place - have asked whether they should place us first on the Common Application Form. After all, if their chances of getting in are quite small, won't they be "wasting" their first preference by ranking us first? Wouldn't they be better off ranking a school they have a higher chance of getting in to first?
This is based on a misunderstanding of how the pan-London admissions process works. The Pan-London Admissions Board does not vary the amount of weight it gives to a parent's application to a particular school depending on where that parent has ranked the school on the Form. Rather, it takes all the schools you've named on your Form, regardless of where you've ranked them, and applies the over-subscription criteria of those schools. Once it has worked out which of the schools on your Form you qualify for a place at, then (and only then) does it look at your order of preferences. You'll then be offered a place at the school you've ranked highest amongst the schools you qualify for a place at.
For example, suppose you place the West London Free School first and another school second. If your child doesn't qualify for a place at our school – because he or she is unsuccessful in the lottery, for instance – but does qualify for a place at your second choice, you'll be offered a place there. Your child won't be discriminated against in the admissions process because you've placed that school second rather than first. Some people imagine the way the admissions process works is that the Board initially applies a school's over-subscription criteria to just those applicants who've placed that school first on the Form and only after the successful applicants have turned down their offers do they then apply the school's oversubscription criteria to those who've ranked it second. But that isn't how it works. The Board applies each school's over-subscription criteria to all those who've named that school on their Forms, regardless of its ordinal position on the Forms.
In the above scenario, the only risk you're taking by placing us first and the other school second is that if you qualify for a place at both of our schools you'll only be offered a place at our school as the higher preference. As explained, the Board takes all those schools on your Form you qualify for a place at and then offers you a place at whichever one of those schools you've ranked highest on the Form. You'll only be offered one place – you won't be informed of all those schools you've qualified for a place at and be asked to choose between them.
The bottom line is that if the West London Free School is your first preference you should put us first. If another school is your first preference, put that school first. You shouldn't base your decision of where to rank us on your assessment of your chances of qualifying for a place at our school since that consideration is irrelevant.
