Academic year 2025/26

Primary and secondary school applications and offers

Preference data including applications and offers made for secondary and primary school entry each September, and the proportion which received preferred offers

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• Produced by: Department for Education
• Published: 12 June 2025
• Last updated: 16 October 2025

2 updates

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• Supporting files

  Supporting files provide an area for teams to supply non-standard files for download by users where required.

• Data guidance

  Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.

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  Alternatively use our data catalogue to search and filter for specific data sets from this release or our entire library, providing full data summaries, data previews and access to API data sets.

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Featured tables

Featured tables are pre-prepared tables created from a statistical release's data sets. They provide statistics that are regularly requested by some users (such as local councils, regional government or government policy teams) and can be adapted to switch between different categories (such as different geographies, time periods or characteristics where available).

3 featured tables

• Timeseries of secondary key preference rates

  Number of secondary applications and key preference rates from 2014/15 to 2025/26

  View, edit or download

• Timeseries of primary key preference rates

  Number of primary applications and key preference rates from 2014/15 to 2025/26

  View, edit or download

• Time series: secondary first preference rates for local authorities with and without selective schools

  Secondary school first preference rates grouped by local authorities which do and don't provide selective schools (grammar schools). Time series 2020/21 to 2025/26

  View, edit or download

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Data sets: download or create tables

Data sets present comprehensive open data from which users can create their own tables using the EES table tool or download a zipped CSV file.

2 data sets available for download

Download all (ZIP)

• Secondary and primary schools applications and offers 2025

  Local authority, National, Regional

  Number of places and applications: number and proportion of offers by preference rank; number and proportion of offers inside and outside home local authority.

  • Number of rows: 3,888
  • Indicators:
    • First preference rate
    • Home LA offer rate
    • No offer rate
  • Filters:
    • School phase
  • Time period: 2014/15 to 2025/26

  Data set information page
  Create table

• Grouped selective secondary application and offer data

  National

  Grouped number and proportion of secondary offers by preference rank split by a) the LAs who have one or more selective schools and b) LAs who have no selective schools

  • Number of rows: 18
  • Indicators:
    • First preference rate
    • No offer rate
    • Non preferred offer rate
  • Filters:
    • Grouped figures by whether LA offers selective schools
  • Time period: 2020/21 to 2025/26

  Data set information page
  Create table

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Supporting files

Supporting files provide an area for teams to supply non-standard files for download by users where required.

1 supporting data file

• School level secondary and primary applications and offers 2025

  Data from the application and offer collections from 2014 to date, produced at school level and giving the number of preferences expressed for each school, by rank, and the number of offers, also by rank, as well as contextual data.

  Download (csv, 61 Mb)

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Data guidance

Description of the data sets included in this release, including information on data sources, coverage, quality and any data conventions used.

Description

This document describes the data included in the ‘Secondary and primary school applications and offers: 2024’ Official Statistics release’s underlying data files. This data is released under the terms of the Open Government License (opens in new tab) and is intended to meet at least 3 stars for Open Data (opens in new tab).

The methodology document for this subject should be referenced alongside this release. It provides information on the data sources, their coverage and quality and how the data is produced.

A guide for the 2025 data collection can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-preference-data-collections-guide (opens in new tab).

Coverage

This release provides information on the number of applications made, the preferences listed and the number and preference level of offers for entries into:

• the main entry point for state-funded secondary school (usually year 7)
• state-funded primary school (reception year)

It includes national, regional and local authority level information on:

• the number of places available
• the number of applications received
• the number and percentage of first, second, non-preferred etc preference offers made
• the number and proportion of offers within and outside the home local authority

The information is based on the separate secondary and primary application and offer (preference) data collections returned by the local authorities.

File formats and conventions

Rounding

Primary and secondary suppression was applied in the 2014 dataset. No suppression has been applied from 2015 onwards

Conventions

The following convention is used throughout the underlying data.

‘c’         Suppressed (2014 only) 

‘z’         Not applicable.

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Contact us

If you have a specific enquiry about Primary and secondary school applications and offers statistics and data:

School census statistics team

Email: school.preference@education.gov.uk
Contact name: Ann Claytor

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If you have a media enquiry:

Telephone: 020 7783 8300

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If you have a general enquiry about the Department for Education (DfE) or education:

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