Schools - Transactions

We completed the first round of allocations for the new P1 & S1 intakes last week. Decisions have been made on placing requests and requests for Roman Catholic schools received up to 24 December 2022. Parents are notified by letter and advise if the request is successful or turned down. We expect delivery of these letters to be completed by Friday 31 March.

Waiting lists are now live - as always, any pupils remaining on the waiting list by the start of term will be passed to you in August.

Those turned down RC catchment schools are allocated a place in their non-denominational catchment school, and the allocations for the children we've turned down have been transferred accordingly on SEEMiS.

A new webpage has gone live with information on the allocations, including next steps and listing schools with available places - www.edinburgh.gov.uk/schoolplaces2023

Parents turned down may request a second choice by choosing one of the schools listed on page 2.

P1 registration remains open for the time being and the Transactions team will continue to deal with these as well as any applications from families moving to or within the Edinburgh area.

Viewing Primary 1 allocations

Your allocated pupils appear in Admissions & Leavers > Admissions > Intake Process > Intake Registration Details.

We did not receive registration forms for several children - we have checked addresses for these children and registered them, so please be aware you may not have registration forms for some of your registered children.

This screen will now include any placing requests we've granted, and children turned down their RC catchment school who have been transferred to their ND catchment school.

If it’s a placing request, you’ll see a message in the Updated column ‘Transfer PR’ followed by the reference number and date.

Transfers from RC schools will show simply ‘Transfer’ and date.

You can see which school they were transferred from by viewing the Comments button and then Comment History.

Viewing Secondary 1 allocations

Your allocated pupils appear in Admissions & Leavers > Allocations > Provisional Allocations Report 

• Primary schools - change Report Type to ‘Allocated From Report’
• Secondary schools - change this to 'Allocated To Report'
• click 'Get report Data'. This will generate a list of pupils.

Under the heading 'Allocation Type' the categories are as follows: 

Accepted by Parent - these are non-catchment requests we have granted, or children granted specialist provision within your school (i.e. performance schools, Enhanced Support Base or Inclusion Resource)
Allocated by Authority - these are catchment pupils.
Withdrawn - these are pupils previously allocated places but are now withdrawn and should not be counted in your figures.

Note - children who are attending a non-CEC primary school appear as current school ‘Unknown’ on the report. Please contact us if you'd like to know where these children are coming from.

What if a place is no longer required?

If parents contact you advising they no longer require a place, please use the contact form to let us know. However, you don't need to tell us about:

• Places in special schools and classes - these are allocated by the Parent & Pupil Support Manager (Additional Support for Learning). We withdraw these places as and when the ASL team confirm these to us. If you believe a pupil has been allocated a place in a special school or class and they still show on your provisional intake, contact us and we'll check.
• Nursery deferrals - these are notified to us by Early Years. We’ve already received and deleted around 650 approved deferrals.

If a family is moving to a new address within Edinburgh, please advise the parent to complete the change of address form.

Important information about your intake

The data on Click+Go is subject to significant change between now and the start of term. If a change is made to either P1 or S1 intakes, you will be notified by email.

You may notice that there are more children allocated places than the agreed intake limit for your school. This is because we guarantee places for all children at their non-denominational catchment school if they applied by 24 December 2022. We always start with higher numbers and experience from past years shows these numbers do drop. The figures will be carefully monitored, and appropriate action taken if necessary.

Next steps

A second allocation will take place in April. Until then we will be keeping a log of any changes, i.e., families moving address, late requests etc.

A third allocation will take place by early May, and we'll answer the second-choice requests at this time.

We plan to have everything as up to date as possible before the appeals begin.  At this time, we'll ask you to contact parents to confirm their acceptance of the places allocated, and you can then mark your leavers on SEEMiS.

We'll post the next update once the second allocation has been completed.

The Easter School Holiday Free School Meals payment was made on 20 March 2023 to all parents of children currently in receipt of free school meals.

The Easter holiday payment is £30 per child, made up of:

• £25 Easter holiday payment and 
• £5 Strike Day Payments (28/02/23 and 01/03/23)

Please note that these payments are only paid to parents with an 'income-based' entitlement to free school meals. Therefore, it is not paid to all parents of P1-P5 children.

Scottish Child Payment

You’ll notice there is no bridging payment this time. These have been replaced by the Scottish Child Payment. Parents of children ages 6 to 15 can apply for the Scottish Child Payment by visiting this website:

www.mygov.scot/scottish-child-payment/how-to-apply

These applications are processed by Social Security Scotland and local authorities are not involved in the assessment or payment process. Please do not refer parents to Transactions as we will be unable to answer them.

As always, applications for EMA will close on 31 March and will reopen for the 2023-24 session in June. We are still receiving applications and we expect awards will continue to be made well into April.

We'll post another update by early May.

If you have any enquiries in the meantime, please continue to use our contact form.