Schools - Transactions

P1 and S1 intake - handover completed

The final allocation of places for both the Primary 1 and Secondary 1 intake is now complete, and waiting lists formally handed over to each school. Responsibility for any future allocation of places in the current P1 and S1 year group, including maintenance of waiting lists, is now delegated to Head Teachers.

Please accept our apologies for the delay in handover this year, due to a number of unforeseen circumstances.

As per the Placing in Schools timetable, any child allocated a place who has failed to attend, can be removed and reallocated if no reply has been given by the parent.

You need no longer inform us of changes to the intake.

Waiting list management

When you come to offer places, you can usually find the contact details by going into Admissions & Leavers > Placing Requests > Maintain Placing Request – and then search by pupil name. If you can’t find the pupil, please contact the ‘allocated school’ where the child should be attending, and they can provide these details.

Reserved places

In primary schools, where possible one place per class (or two places in team teaching classes) should be retained throughout the year for incoming catchment children.

In secondary schools, where possible one place per every 60 pupils has been reserved in the S1 year group for incoming catchment children, and these should be retained throughout the year until filled by a catchment pupil.

In some cases it has not been possible to reserve any places in P1 or S1 and the intake is full. In these cases where a pupil leaves the year group mid-year, you would retain this as a reserved place.

Please note: reserved places should be only be allocated to children whose parents move into and provide proof of residence within your catchment area.

Details on 2021 Intake

Procedures for next year's intake are being finalised soon as we will share the timetable in due course.

One area we are looking into is the possibility of online registration, as the ongoing restrictions mean the usual registration process is not possible. Full details will be shared once agreed.

In the meantime we'd be grateful if you checked the following:

Nursery year groups - All nursery children born between 1 March 2016 and 28 February 2017 will be eligible for P1 in August 2021. If they attend a nursery they should be year group N5 - we often find children are wrongly recorded on SEEMiS. Please check you have all children in this date of birth range recorded as N5.

No UPRN - check your N5 and P7 pupils have a UPRN (unique property reference number). This should be verified when you enter or change a pupil's address. The UPRN is important as we use this to determine the pupil's catchment schools.

You can run the Custom Report 'No UPRN' to view all current pupils in your school who don't have a UPRN. Its good practice to run this regularly.

If you have any simply go to Records > Edit and in the address tab, click on the 'Verify Address' button and choose the pupil's address. This will populate the UPRN automatically.

Please note:

• some addresses will have a different format (i.e. 22 (3f1) may appear as 22/7) so you may need to check this first.
• if the address does not show when you click on verify address, check you have the right postcode - check it here: www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode
• properties in new build developments may not yet be uploaded to SEEMiS, in this case you cannot verify the address and the UPRN will remain blank.

Free school meals and clothing grants

In July we were able to automatically award free school meals to over 5,300 children based on information held on parents' benefit claims.

We also launched a new online application form which has made the renewal process much smoother for parents.

Applications are being turned around in 10 days or less and successful awards are being approved on SEEMiS the next day.

Common issues and misconceptions:

• parents are not detailing all children they wish to apply for on the form. You may find one child has been approved for FSM but not and older sibling.
• parents expected to be auto-awarded but they have not been. Parents may expect this especially if they were auto-awarded last year. There is no guarantee an auto-award will happen every year as circumstances change.  We wrote to all parents who were eligible for an auto-award in July - anyone not auto-awarded must reapply.
• to carry out auto-awards, a data matching exercise is undertaken using the pupil data on SEEMiS against the data held on our benefits system. In many cases names and even dates of birth do not match, and in these cases we cannot complete an auto-award.

We are experiencing a high volume of enquiries about FSM/CG, so we'd be grateful if you could limit enquiries where possible. Use our contact form if you do need to contact us.

If parents have a query about their eligibility, they should contact us directly. Due to working remotely we are not able to take calls just now. Parents can contact us by email at: school.grants@edinburgh.gov.uk providing their full name, address and benefit reference number (if they have one). We'll respond as quickly as we can.

Education Maintenance Allowance

Whilst our efforts have concentrated on completing the placements handover and processing of FSM/CG applications, we have received a steady flow of EMA applications since we opened applications in July.

We expect that the first successful applicants will be notified at the end of September and payments will begin in October. The payment calendar will be shared with our EMA contacts before the end of September.

Contacting us

Please avoid emailing the public mailboxes where possible and use our contact form.