Reception Admissions



Find out how to apply for Reception class starting in 2023.

Europa School UK is part of Oxfordshire County Council’s admissions round and for subsequent years.

We admit 90 pupils per year for three classes in Reception. Children are either learning through French and English, or German and English, or else Spanish and English. In the UK, a child starts  Reception the September after their 4th birthday.

Before you apply, we request that you consider very carefully the long-term, whole-family commitment involved. We encourage you to look closely at our curriculum and find out more about becoming bilingual. Learning in two languages is a wonderful opportunity but it will be hard work and needs your full commitment.

Applications can usually be submitted from around November of the year before on the website of the county council.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

I do not understand how the nodal points work. Can you give an example please?
When we receive the list with applicants from the county council, each applicant’s distance to each of our nodal point is calculated:

We confirm with the county council which pupils have sibling or staff priority (do not forget to include this information on the form). The super-computer from the county council does the rest: it first deducts the children that are allocated a place by criteria A to D of the admissions policy. It then calculates how many places will be assigned to each nodal point and will proceed to do so. As you can see in the example picture, for each applicant, the distance to each nodal point is given. This means that sometimes a child that lives a long way from the school is offered a place whilst another who lives closer is not.  In this case, the successful applicant was admitted via a different point than the school.

The school is oversubscribed, which means that we receive more applications than that we have places. As a consequence, it will be very difficult for Reese White, illustrated in the example above, to obtain a place until they have a local address. Many families moving from abroad face this difficulty.

The school cannot give any advice on where you should obtain an address, so please don’t ask us! Since the area depends on how many people apply and where they live, the distances to the 3 nodal points can change from one year to the next.

How do you determine who goes in which class (which language) for reception?
First, we determine a ranking from 1 to 90 on the basis of our admissions policy. After the siblings and staff children, we use the ranking determined by entry to give priority. (First node 1, then node 2, etc. keeping the balance as much as possible to 50/35/15%).

The county council will send us the first and second preferences as parents have indicated when applying for a school place. We will only receive this information after places have been allocated.

We then go down the list and offer applicant number 1 their preference, then number 2,we cannot make any decisions based on background and culture, and this is the only unbiased way we can make this decision.

Kiddylinguistics
Even though the Kiddylinguistics nursery is located on school premises, it is an independent organisation and attendance does not give any priority for entry to the school. Please refer to our admissions policy for information on our oversubscription criteria.

There are many stories about schools that are underfunded. Are you impacted by this?
Yes, unfortunately our funding is low but we have benefited from generous voluntary parental donations in the last two years, enabling us to continue to enrich the education of our pupils. For more information on fundraising please see our Fundraising page.

Take a look at the timeline, find out what happens in the first couple of weeks and read our FAQs!

 

Parent Handbook:

It is full of practical information about school life, so be sure to read it please. It will be updated for next school year, but most of the information will still be relevant.

Click here to view