GLA School Roll Projection Service templates

Templates for the submission of data for use in the GLA School Roll Projection Service

Notes on completing the Actual Roll templates:

Subscribers should use the templates included on this page to provide roll data for individual schools. This data should be split by national curriculum year and gender. Data for primary and secondary schools should be provided in the separate templates. Data for special schools and pupil referral units should be excluded.

Please do not change the names of position of the column headers or change the file format of the template.

Planning Area: This is used for aggregation of projections into planning area level projections. Where possible, it is recommended that the same naming convention for planning areas is used each year to faciliatate the comparison of results between successive rounds of projections. If a school is not in a planning area then this field should be left blank.

DfE Number: Please enter the school’s DfE number either with or without the borough identifier.

School Name: Where a school has both a primary and secondary phase the school name should be consistent across both roll files.

Notes on completing the Ward to Planning Area Matrix:

These matrices are used to apportion ward-level population data to education planning areas. Estimated and projected population by education planning area are produced as reporting outputs, and serve to provide context to and assist with quality assurance of the roll projections themselves.

It is only necessary to provide a new matrix in the event of changes to existing planning areas.

The matrices are not used directly in the production of the scholl roll projections, which are instead based on relationships between pupil's ward of residence and school attended that have been derived from anonymised extracts of records from the National Pupil Database.

The templates are pre-populated with default identifiers for planning areas (PA1 to PA15). If necessary, these should be changed to be consistent with the planning area names used in the submitted Actual Roll templates.

Each cell in the body of the matrix represents the proportion of the population for the ward in the cell's row that should be allocated to the planning area in the cell's column. This proportion should be a value between 0 and 1, with blank cells being treated as zeroes.

Both primary and (if applicable) secondary school planning areas should be included in the same template. If only primary planning areas are included, the values of the cells in each row should sum to 1. If secondary planning areas are also included, they should sum to 2.

There is no single "correct" way to assign ward populations to planning areas in the template - different local authorities draw up planning area boundaries using different methods and criteria, and the method used to apportion the population here is inherrently crude. In practice, rough approximations are sufficient for the purpose to which they are applied.