For a secondary school place, where you live matters far more than when you apply
A child in London has a 71.4% chance of a first-choice secondary place. In the South West it is 90.7%. That 19-point gap between regions is more than six times the largest change any region has seen in thirteen years — and it has not narrowed.
Every March, the coverage of National Offer Day is national: how many families got their first choice, whether it is up or down on last year. That framing hides the only number that decides most applications. For secondary places in 2026/27, a family in London had a 71.4% chance of a first-choice offer. In the South West it was 90.7%.
That is a 19.3 percentage point gap. The largest change any English region has seen across the whole thirteen years of available data is 3.0 points, in the West Midlands. The gap between places is more than six times the movement over time — and it has been there, at roughly this size, every single year.
Nothing has moved, anywhere
It is worth being precise about how little changes. Across thirteen years, every English region's first-preference rate for secondary places has stayed within a few points of where it began:
| Region | 2026/27 | Change since 2014/15 |
|---|---|---|
| South West | 90.7% | +0.4pp |
| North East | 90.2% | -0.4pp |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | 88.1% | +1.2pp |
| East Midlands | 87.1% | -2.8pp |
| North West | 85.8% | -0.3pp |
| East of England | 84.6% | -1.1pp |
| West Midlands | 82.2% | +3pp |
| South East | 82.0% | -2.4pp |
| London | 71.4% | +2.3pp |
A family that moved from London to the South West would improve their odds by 19.3 points. A family that waited thirteen years in the same place would improve them by three at the most, and in several regions would go slightly backwards.
Primary is a different story — and the opposite one
Primary admissions really have eased, and substantially. The share of primary schools receiving more first preferences than they have places has fallen from 35.3% in 2014/15 to 22.0% in 2026/27.
This is demography, not policy. Births in England peaked in 2012 and have fallen almost every year since; that cohort cleared reception around 2017 and primary rolls have been shrinking behind it. The same bulge is why secondary tightened through the late 2010s — and why, now that it is passing out the other side, secondary has eased back to 37.9%, close to its 39.2% starting point.
And here the two phases invert. For primary, when you applied mattered more than where: London improved by 8.7 points over the period, more than the 7.4-point spread between the best and worst regions today. For secondary, the reverse, and not narrowly.
What this means if you are applying
If you are applying for a reception place, the national picture is genuinely better than it was, and better than the coverage suggests. If you are applying for Year 7, it is roughly what it was thirteen years ago, and what it is depends overwhelmingly on where you live.
None of this says anything about one school. A regional rate of 90.7% does not mean the school you want is easy to get into, and spare capacity two miles away does not create a place at the one you want — popular schools stayed popular throughout. The number that matters is the one for the specific school, which you can look up on the map or by asking directly.
Method, and what it does not cover
Department for Education applications-and-offers statistics for state-funded schools in England, 2014/15 to 2026/27. Three things are worth stating plainly.
Every trend here is computed twice. Once across all schools, and once across a constant panel — only schools reporting in both the first and last year — because the dataset grows over time and schools that start reporting late are not a random sample. The two agree for primary. For secondary they do not: all schools show oversubscription falling from 39.2% to 37.9%, while the same-schools panel shows it rising to 43.0%. New schools open undersubscribed, which pulls the unrestricted figure down. Both are true of what they measure; the all-schools basis is quoted above because a family can apply to a school that opened last year.
The sample is genuinely national. Coverage is between 71.3% and 85.1% of schools in every English region, London lowest at 71.3%. That check matters — we hold other datasets that look national and are not.
| Region | With data | Total | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| East Midlands | 1,804 | 2,178 | 82.8% |
| East of England | 2,210 | 2,715 | 81.4% |
| London | 2,133 | 2,991 | 71.3% |
| North East | 979 | 1,185 | 82.6% |
| North West | 2,793 | 3,398 | 82.2% |
| South East | 2,801 | 3,776 | 74.2% |
| South West | 2,088 | 2,515 | 83.0% |
| West Midlands | 2,070 | 2,579 | 80.3% |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | 1,988 | 2,336 | 85.1% |
Scope. England only — Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate admissions systems and publish nothing directly comparable — and mainstream state schools only. It says nothing about independent schools or specialist SEND provision, where the pressures are different and, in the case of SEND, moving the other way. "First preference" also flatters the system slightly: families in areas they know to be tight often name a school they expect to get rather than the one they want.
How this was calculated. Computed from Department for Education applications-and-offers data for every state-funded school in England, 2014/15 to 2026/27. Figures generated 18 August 2026. Primary source: DfE — Secondary and primary school applications and offers. Every figure on this page, and the sample it rests on, is published as machine-readable data — so the numbers can be checked, reused or disagreed with rather than taken on trust.