Europa School UK is part of Oxfordshire County Council’s admissions round for 2020 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.
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.
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!
National Allocation Day: letters (sent by second class post) and emails sent detailing the offer of a school place. If the answer is negative, please make sure to tell the county council that you wish to remain on our continued interest list for round 2. (Usually you can do this via the portal that you used to apply).The school will receive a list from the county council with the first and second language preference. We will confirm everyone’s language allocation before the deadline at the beginning of May. NB Check your spam e-mail regularly in case our e-mails are sent there.
June 2023
Second allocation round: This will include all late applications and those that requested to be on our continued interest list. We usually have some places for this round.
End of year
Introduction, hopefully in person.
Summer23
We will send login details through the parent portal to those who accepted the place. You will be asked to fill in all missing information and check that all details.
September 2023
Start of the school year: The children will have the first week to settle in properly before starting full days.
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.