Schools - Transactions

The final allocation of places for both the Primary 1 and Secondary 1 intake is now complete, and waiting lists are being emailed to schools today. 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.

This year we have included the parent name, telephone number and email address on the waiting lists to make it easier to get in touch when you need to.

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.

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.

In a small number of cases the number of children allocated places in P1 is over the official intake limit. This is due to children granted places by the Placing in Schools Appeal Committee, who have power to grant places turned down by the authority. In these cases, the pupils granted by the appeal committee are legally ‘excepted’ and do not count towards the pupil roll.

Details on 2022 Intake

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

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

• Nursery year groups - All nursery children born between 1 March 2017 and 28 February 2018 will be eligible for P1 in August 2022. 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 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.

In July we were able to automatically award free school meals to over 5,000 children based on information held on parents' benefit claims. If we already held their bank details, we paid their clothing grant using these details.

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.

Please refer to the FSM Help Sheet on the Orb which includes details on how to view reports of your eligible pupils.

Children in P1, P2, P3 automatically receive free school meals. From August 2021 P4 children also get automatic free school meals. We still record entitlement on SEEMiS for these pupils so you can determine who is entitled to receive free milk.

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. We are still working remotely so we are not taking 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.

EMA applications opened in July and we are receiving a steady flow of applications.

This year the learning agreement will be an online form which students will complete when we notify them of their award.  We will continue the system of school approval by sending weekly spreadsheets. We expect to confirm the first awards in September.

We established a new contact form on the Orb in February 2019. This is our preferred form of contact for schools, as we prioritise these submissions, so you get a prompt response.

All our incoming mail and enquiries are scanned into a document management system and then allocated for processing (normally oldest mail first). This enables us to constantly monitor the volume of enquiries and resource accordingly. The system works by indexing everything to the parent’s address.

We are still receiving several emails to generic mailboxes and officers' individual mailboxes. This causes delays to response times as often emails do not contain the parent name or address. It can often take some time before we can respond due to the volumes received.

When you use the contact form, please keep enquiries to a minimum where possible. Many enquiries are simply asking for progress on a parent's application. If the parent has applied, we will process the application and notify them of the outcome so please advise the parent to wait for us to contact them. In most cases parents should be contacting us directly.

Click here to access our contact form.

The next update will follow in September when details of the procedure for P1 and S1 Intake will be shared. This page on the Orb will also be updated around the same time detailing the process.