Make Offers

The Make Offers routine on the Process | Transfer Groups | Students tab page is the first stage in the process of creating offers for students based on their preferences and on the oversubscription criteria set for each sub group. The Make Offers process runs only against preferences for bases that are receivers within the home local authority.

Before running the Make Offers process, applications for Home Local Authority schools that are marked Edit Rank should be given the ranking information provided by the Other Admission Authority school, either manually or though the import of the ASL file.

• For normal phased transfer groups, the Make Offers process is normally only run once.
• For in year transfer groups the Make Offers process is normally run once for each process period within the in-year transfer group. There can be multiple process periods for an in-year transfer group, so it is likely that the portion of the process between Make Offers and Final Allocation will be run multiple times for the transfer group over the course of an academic year.

The following conditions must be met before the Make Offers routine can be run:

• Applications for Home LA schools that are marked Edit Rank should be given the ranking information provided by the Other Admission Authority school, either manually or by importing an ASL file.
• If your LA has previously been through an iteration of Make Offers, Resolve Offers and Final Allocation for a particular In Year group process period, then you must run the In Year Reset process in order to be able to run Make Offers again.

While you can run the Make Offers routine without running the Student Selection or Pre-Offer processes (i.e. the Feeder Receiver, Catchments & Distances and Copy Applicant Reasons processes), running these routines may help you to make the student allocation process more efficient.

Preferences that meet any of the following criteria are not included in the Make Offers process:

• Preferences that already have a status of R (refused by LA) or X (refused by parent).
• System-generated preferences (i.e. those preferences where the preference number is greater than or equal to the transfer group process start number).
• Preferences that are associated with withdrawn applications.

If your Local Authority has previously been through an iteration of Make Offers, Resolve Offers and Final Allocation for a process period of an in year group, then you should run the In Year Reset process before beginning the next iteration of Make Offers, Resolve Offers and Final Allocation. If In Year Reset is not run, then it will not be possible to re-run Make Offers since One will recognise that Final Allocation has already been run.

One runs a series of initial validation checks when the Make Offers button is clicked. For example, One checks to see if there are already allocations for the selected transfer group, if there are students applying to selective schools who don’t have test scores and if there are any students that do not have bands attached when Banding is in use. Once all of these checks have been completed any error messages are displayed. You should correct the errors and then click the Make Offers button again.

One then makes an offer up to the published admissions number (PAN) for normal phased transfer groups or the vacancies number for in year transfer groups, based on the ordered list of students applying to the school. For Edit Rank schools the order is based on the previously added rank. For Local Authority maintained schools the list is sorted according to oversubscription criteria.

The following description applies to schools that are not using banding. For a summary of the additional processes carried out by the Make Offers routine for schools using banding, see the links at the end of this topic.

• Any students in the unranked group (those who are not in a priority group and who are not likely to be offered a place) who have a preference for an Edit Rank school have their allocation status set to R (Refused by Local Authority) by the Make Offers process. These students do not have a One rank added on import, so there is no rank against the preference. Consequently, a place is not allocated. If the school uses banding then this process happens within the relevant bands.
  If the student is subsequently exported in an ALT file, their allocation status is mapped to N (No current offer).
• Any records that already have a status of R (Refused by Local Authority) or X (Refused by Parent) are not included in the Make Offers process.

When the Make Offers button is clicked, One first checks how many places are available at each base. For normal phased transfer groups this umber is denoted by the PAN. For in year transfer groups this is the number of vacancies, as follows:

Normal Phased

One checks that all the receiver bases have a PAN set up against them for the NCY and year of the transfer group before processing any offers. If One finds any receiver bases that do not have a current PAN, then an error message is displayed and the checks continue.

Once the checks are completed, One displays a list of all the receiver bases in the transfer group that do not have a PAN. If you continue with the offer routine, One treats any receiver bases without a PAN as though there were no places available at that school.

In Year

One first determines which process period is to be used on this occasion. The system date is used to determine the most recent Application Closing date that has passed (it is likely that process periods will overlap so more than one process period may be active on the system date). This is the process period that is used for the Make Offers routine. This process period is then used to gather the information about vacancies for each base.

If there are either no process periods defined for the selected group, no active process period available or if the system date is within an active process period (i.e. is between the start date and offer date) but is earlier than the Application Closing date, then an error message is displayed once all initial validation checks have been run. Any errors should then be corrected and the Make Offers routine re-run, since the routine will have been halted before offer processing was started.

 

For normal phased transfer groups, the Make Offers routine continues for all students selected for transfer within the selected transfer group.

For in year transfer groups it is not necessary for each receiver base to have a vacancy record defined for the current process period. The process assumes that if there is no vacancy record then there are no places available for the receiver. A report is displayed at this point in the process, listing all the bases that do have vacancies available for processing, so that you are aware of the bases that are being used for processing. Clicking Continue continues the Make Offers process. Clicking Cancel stops the process so that you can make changes.