Ealing High School Places: Apply by 31 October, 6 Choices

Applications for a high school place in Ealing opened on 1 September and close at 11.59pm on Saturday 31 October. Parents of children now in Year 6 have eight weeks to name up to six schools.

The council’s own figures show why the order and the choice of those six matter. Last year 27 in every 100 Ealing children did not get their first preference. At one school, 245 on-time applications were refused for a single missing form.

The dates that matter

From the council’s Starting High School 2027 prospectus:

• Friday 23 October 2026: recommended date to hand a paper form to your child’s primary school. Primary schools are closed for half term from 26 to 30 October.
• Saturday 31 October 2026: closing date. Online applications at eAdmissions can be submitted until 11.59pm.
• Tuesday 8 December 2026: last date a late application can be considered as on time, and the last date to tell the council you have moved.
• Monday 1 March 2027: national offer day. Online applicants get an email between 5pm and 10pm.
• Monday 15 March 2027: deadline to accept or decline. The council says an offer you do not respond to may be withdrawn and given to another child.

You can name up to six schools, inside or outside the borough. Independent schools are not part of the process and have to be approached directly.

Putting a school first does not give you priority

This is the point the prospectus makes most bluntly, and it is the one most often misunderstood. Schools cannot see where you ranked them, and the order is not part of any admissions criteria. Listing a school first does not put you above a family that listed it sixth.

What the order does is decide which offer you get. Your child is offered a place at the highest preference they qualify for, and withdrawn from every school below it. So the order should be your genuine order of preference, not a tactical guess.

The council’s other piece of advice is more pointed. It says you should spend at least one of your six on a school where you are either in a higher criterion, or in the same criterion but living much closer than the last child offered a place last year.

How each school filled up last year

The prospectus publishes a statistics table showing how many preferences each school attracted for September 2026 entry, and where the last place went. One caution before reading it: this counts every preference at any rank, so a single child can appear in up to six rows.

Seven of the 17 schools offered a place to every child who applied on time for September 2026. The four church schools at the top of the table did not come close.

The 245 refusals at Twyford, and a deadline ten days early

Twyford CofE High School in Acton drew more preferences than any school in the borough, 1,375 for 190 places. Almost all of those places are decided by church attendance rather than by distance.

The school splits its intake three ways:

• 150 foundation (Christian) places
• 21 world faith places
• 19 specialist music places, decided by an aptitude assessment

Points are awarded for how long and how often both the child and a parent have attended a place of worship. The maximum is 21 points for a foundation place and 20 for a world faith place. The evidence is a supplementary information form plus a reference from a parish priest, minister or religious leader.

Families who sent no form were not ranked at all. The council’s table for September 2026 entry records 245 applications under “children with no supplementary information form”, nought offered and 245 refused. That is more than the school’s entire Year 7 intake.

The form has its own deadline, and it falls before the council’s. Twyford requires the supplementary form and the religious reference at the school by 4pm on Wednesday 21 October 2026, ten days before applications close. Anything arriving later will be acknowledged, the prospectus says, but cannot be considered until after offers have been made on 1 March.

Even with the form, the bar was high last year:

• The last foundation place went to a family on the maximum 21 points, living outside the named deaneries, 3.657 miles away.
• The last world faith place went to a family on the maximum 20 points, living inside the Ealing deanery, 0.376 of a mile away.

The Cardinal Wiseman Catholic School in Greenford also requires a supplementary form, returned to the school by the closing date. Catholic applicants under its Certificate of Catholic Practice criteria must send that certificate by the closing date too. Its last place in 2026 went under the catechumens and Eastern Christian criterion, at 2.293 miles, and the 133 applications ranked below that criterion were all refused.

Both forms come from the schools, not from eAdmissions. Download them from the school’s own website now rather than in the last week of October.

Distance is measured in fractions of a mile

At the community and academy schools the tie-breaker is a straight line from home to school, and the cut-offs are tight. Ealing Fields ran out of places at 0.493 of a mile. Ada Lovelace stopped at 0.683. Elthorne Park reached 0.897.

Two schools are noticeably more open on distance. Featherstone offered its last place at 1.522 miles and Drayton Manor at 1.647 miles.

Ark Soane uses two measurements, 0.518 of a mile from Ealing Town Hall and 0.960 of a mile from the school itself, so the figure that applies depends on which half of its intake you are competing for.

None of these distances carries over to next year. They record where the line fell in March 2026, and they move as applications move. The council presents them as a guide to your chances, not a guarantee.

How Ealing compared with London

On offer day in March 2026 the council reported that 72.9% of Ealing children were offered their first preference, against a London average of 70.5%. That put the borough 10th of the 33 London boroughs.

On the wider measure Ealing sat slightly below London. Some 88.6% of Ealing children got one of their top three, against a London average of 89.6%.

Read the first figure the other way round and it is the number that should shape your six choices. More than a quarter of Ealing families did not get the school they wanted most.

Appeals rarely work

The prospectus also publishes appeal outcomes for 2025. Across the 17 schools, 225 appeals were lodged, 211 were heard, and 20 were upheld. That is fewer than one in ten of those heard.

Almost all of them were concentrated at four schools: Twyford (55 lodged), William Perkin (52), Ada Lovelace (43) and Cardinal Wiseman (25). Nine schools had no appeals at all.

What it means for you

• Apply through eAdmissions by 11.59pm on Saturday 31 October. There is no advantage in applying early, and none in applying on the last night either, but the portal closing is final.
• Use all six preferences. Naming fewer schools does not improve your odds at any of them.
• Put at least one realistic school on the list. Check last year’s criterion and distance for your address before you decide.
• If Twyford is on your list, its supplementary form and religious reference must reach the school by 4pm on 21 October, not 31 October. Last year 245 applications arrived without a form and every one was refused. Cardinal Wiseman’s form is due by the closing date.
• Open evenings are running through late September and October. Dates for every school are in the prospectus and on the council’s high school open day events page.
• If you move house before 31 October, the new address must be used. If you move between 1 November and 8 December you can choose to update it, but you have to tell the admissions service.

Distance criteria make the school run part of the housing decision in Ealing, which is visible in our Ealing house prices page. If you are weighing schools on results, we checked what every state secondary in the borough actually published this summer in Ealing GCSE results 2026.

Sources

• Ealing Council, Starting high school 2027 prospectus (PDF)
• Ealing Council, High school on-time offers 2026 (PDF)
• Ealing Council, Applying for a high school
• Around Ealing, High school: ready to apply for a place?, 4 September 2026
• Around Ealing, Secondary school offers announced, 5 March 2026