National Offer Day and the Common Application Form Timeline (2026–27)

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The Common Application Form (CAF) for September 2027 secondary entry opens on 1 September 2026 and closes at 11.59pm on 31 October 2026. National Offer Day, when your home local authority tells you the single school place your form has produced, does not arrive until Monday 1 March 2027 — four calendar months later. Most guides jump straight from "apply by 31 October" to "offers on 1 March" without explaining what happens to your form in between, or how the registration and testing deadlines set by individual local authorities relate to that single national CAF cutoff. This guide is the calendar for that period: when the CAF window opens, exactly what the 31 October deadline requires, how ranked preferences are actually processed against admissions criteria between submission and Offer Day, and named regional testing dates from three different authorities so you can see how your own local timetable fits around the national one. For everything that happens after National Offer Day itself — accepting or declining, appeal deadlines, and waiting-list movement — see our companion guide, the post-results day decision timeline, which picks up exactly where this one ends.

When Does the Common Application Form Open for 2026–27 Entry?

The CAF window for children starting secondary school in September 2027 opens on 1 September 2026, at the very start of Year 6, and is submitted online through your home local authority — the council where your child's registered address falls, regardless of which schools, areas, or authorities you intend to list as preferences. This is set nationally under the School Admissions Code; every local authority in England opens and closes the CAF window on the same two dates, which is the one fixed point every family can rely on regardless of where they live. Grammar school registration and testing, by contrast, is set separately by each local authority or consortium and typically opens and closes earlier, between May and July 2026 — well before the CAF window even opens. This means a family's grammar test registration decisions are already behind them by the time the CAF itself becomes available to complete.

Filling in the CAF earlier in the window carries no advantage over filling it in on 30 October — the Equal Preference System (explained in full below) does not reward early submission with better allocation odds. What earlier submission does provide is time: time to correct an error, time to add a school you had not originally considered, and time to obtain any required Supplementary Information Form for a faith school, which is submitted directly to the school rather than the local authority and often carries its own, earlier deadline.

What Is the Common Application Form Deadline, and What Happens If You Miss It?

The CAF deadline is 11.59pm on 31 October 2026 for September 2027 entry — a single national cutoff regardless of local authority. Local authorities are explicit that missing it materially reduces your chances: a late application is processed after on-time applications have already been allocated, meaning your child is compared against whatever places remain rather than the full set available on 1 March 2027. On-time applicants who receive no offer from any of their listed preferences are allocated the nearest school with a vacancy by their local authority; late applicants face the same fallback but from a smaller remaining pool. If personal circumstances make the deadline exceptionally difficult to meet, most authorities have a discretionary late-application process, but it must be requested and justified before, or as close as possible to, 31 October — not after. Official guidance on the application process itself, published by the Department for Education, is available at gov.uk/schools-admissions.

How Does Ranking and Allocation Actually Work Between Submission and Offer Day?

Almost no competitor content explains this part, yet it is the mechanism that decides every outcome on 1 March 2027. England's secondary admissions system runs on what is formally called the Equal Preference System, and it does not process your CAF in the order you ranked your schools. Instead, it treats every school you named as a genuinely separate, simultaneous application, and works through four distinct steps:

Step 1 — Compile ranked lists per school, not per family. For every school named on any CAF in its catchment or admissions area, the admissions authority (the school itself, for voluntary-aided and academy schools, or the local authority, for community schools) builds its own ranked list of every child who named it, ordered strictly by that school's published admissions criteria — distance from home, sibling links, faith practice, looked-after-child status, or a qualifying test score for grammar schools. Your preference ranking is recorded but plays no part in this initial ordering.

Step 2 — Initial allocation against each school's Published Admission Number (PAN). Children at the top of each school's ranked list, up to that school's PAN, are provisionally allocated a place at that school.

Step 3 — Cascade and re-rank. Software run centrally for each local authority area then checks, for every child, whether they have been provisionally allocated a place at more than one school. If so, they are kept only at their highest-ranked preference among those, and removed from every list below it. Removing a child from a lower list frees a place, which the next-ranked child on that list moves into — who may, in turn, already hold a higher-ranked provisional place elsewhere and therefore not take it up. This cascade repeats until no further movement is possible and every child holds exactly one provisional place, at the highest-ranked school on their CAF where the school's own criteria placed them within its PAN.

Step 4 — Final offers. The single resulting place for each child becomes the offer released on 1 March 2027. Children not allocated any of their listed preferences are placed on waiting lists for their higher preferences and offered the nearest school with an available vacancy as a default place.

The practical consequence is one competitor pages consistently under-explain: listing a single, oversubscribed school as your only preference does not improve your odds of getting it, and ranking a less-preferred school second does not put you "in competition" with your own first choice — each school's list is built independently of your ranking. What ranking order does determine is which single offer you receive once more than one school could theoretically take you; it has no bearing on whether any individual school's own list places you within its PAN.

Do Grammar School Registration and Test Deadlines Line Up With the CAF Deadline?

No — and this is where families most often get the sequencing wrong. Grammar school (or selective) registration and testing is set independently by each local authority or consortium, runs earlier in the year, and must conclude with results published before the single national 31 October CAF deadline, so that scores are available to rank preferences correctly. The three tables below, drawn from official council timetables for the current 2026–27 cycle (September 2027 entry), show how differently three neighbouring systems schedule the same underlying process.

All three release results between 9 and 15 October 2026 — a two-to-three-week window before the 31 October CAF deadline, deliberately timed so families can finalise their ranked preferences knowing an actual test outcome, rather than guessing. Every one of these registration windows also closes well before the CAF itself opens on 1 September 2026, so by the time you sit down to complete the CAF, your selective-test decisions are already locked in. For area-specific guidance, our Kent grammar schools guide and Buckinghamshire grammar schools guide cover each system's admissions criteria in full, and our broader grammar school admissions process guide covers registration mechanics for other regions.

How Many Schools Can You List, and Does the Order Matter?

Most local authorities allow families to list three or four schools in preference order on the CAF. London is the significant exception: the Pan-London Admissions Scheme, which coordinates admissions across all 33 London boroughs, allows up to six preferences and processed 87,512 secondary applications in the most recent cycle. Under the Equal Preference System explained above, order matters completely for determining which single offer you end up with, but it has no bearing on whether any individual school ranks you within its own PAN — a school never sees where it sits on your list, so ranking your genuinely most-wanted school first carries no downside.

Two practical rules follow directly from the mechanics. First, if your child is sitting a selective test, rank every grammar or selective school you would accept above your non-selective preferences, since the system will only consider you for a lower-ranked school if none of your higher-ranked ones place you within their criteria. Second, include at least one realistic, close-to-certain school — typically your catchment or nearest community school — as a final preference, because a CAF listing only competitive, oversubscribed schools risks the local-authority default allocation if none of them come through, which is rarely the outcome families want.

What Are the Actual Odds? National Offer Day Outcomes by the Numbers

The most recent published Department for Education figures, for the 2025 cycle, show that 83.5% of families nationally received an offer from their first-preference secondary school, and 94.9% received one of their top three preferences. London, which runs the largest and most competitive volume of applications through the Pan-London Admissions Scheme, recorded a lower first-preference rate of 71.6% (up 1.1 percentage points on the year before) and a top-three rate of 90.5%, with 94.8% of children receiving an offer from one of their listed preferences overall, from 87,512 total applications — a 3.1% fall in application volume on the previous cycle. These are 2025-cycle figures; the equivalent statistics for the 2026–27 cycle covered in this guide are not published by the Department for Education until several months after the 1 March 2027 Offer Day itself.

The gap between the national and London figures illustrates why the CAF ranking decisions made by 31 October carry more weight in high-density areas: with more applicants competing for the same PAN at oversubscribed schools, the Equal Preference System's cascading re-ranking has more genuine competition to resolve at each level, which is reflected directly in a lower first-preference success rate.

National Offer Day Itself: What Happens on 1 March 2027

National Offer Day, Monday 1 March 2027, is the terminal event of everything described above: the single point at which the Equal Preference System's four-step process, run continuously since the 31 October CAF deadline, produces one confirmed offer per child. Most local authorities notify by email or an online portal from early morning, with paper letters following for families who applied by post. Three outcomes are possible — an offer at a listed preference, a place at a different school with waiting-list status for higher preferences, or, less commonly, a local-authority default allocation to the nearest school with a vacancy if none of your listed preferences came through.

Everything that happens from this point forward — the accept-or-decline deadline (typically 10–14 days after Offer Day), how to lodge and prepare an appeal, how waiting lists actually move month by month, and what to do if a place still is not resolved by September — is covered in full, with named regional deadlines and appeal-success data, in our companion guide: the post-results day decision timeline for the 11+. This guide's calendar ends where that one begins.

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