Explanation of Make Offers for Fair Banded Receivers

The Make Offers routine for banded receivers is identical to the routine for phased, non-banded receivers up to the point where applications with no parental preferences are added to the No Application base (step 5 of the process as detailed in Explanation of the Make Offers Process (Phased)).

However, One uses a different process to allocate students to banded receivers, as opposed to non-banded receivers. Furthermore, the allocation process for banded schools differs depending on whether the school in question is an Edit Rank school or not. The process below details the routines One uses to allocate students to bases where Fair banding is in use.

When fair banding is used, students can only be associated with and considered for an offer in one band.

Non-Edit Rank Receivers

  1. One sorts students into bands, based on their test scores.
  2. One ranks the children who have been sorted into the highest-priority band by the oversubscription criteria (i.e. the students are sorted by the first oversubscription criterion, then sorted on the second criterion in sets of the first, and so on).
  3. One makes offers for the highest-priority band up to the PAN. Students ranked within the band PAN are given a status of O (Offer), while students ranked outside the PAN are given a status of N (No Current Offer).
  4. One repeats steps 2 and 3 for the remaining bands.

Edit Rank Receivers

  1. Each OAA receiver school organises students into bands, based on their test scores.
  2. The receiver ranks the students in each sub group.
  3. The band assignments and ranking information is passed to the Local Authority by the receiver.
  4. The band assignment and ranking information is entered into Admissions and Transfers by the Local Authority. This information can either be entered manually or by importing an ASL file.

    Since students have already been assigned to bands by the receiver (unlike when Make Offers is run for non-OAA receivers using fair banding – see above) there is no need for the Local Authority to assign students to bands. Any students with a preference for an OAA using fair-banding that have not been assigned to a band prior to running Make Offers are caught by the initial checking and an error is displayed.

  5. One assigns an offer status to each student that has already been assigned to one of the fair bands, based on the student's rank and the band PAN.
    • Students ranked within the band PAN are given a status of O (Offer).
    • Students ranked below the band PAN are given a status of N (No Current Offer).
    • Unranked preferences for a Home LA school that uses aptitude banding in an Edit Rank sub group are updated to R (Refused by LA). If a student with unranked preferences is then exported using the ALT file, the allocation status is mapped to N (No current offer).

      All changes to the main offer status are reflected in the Preference History.