Choice Advice is about helping and supporting families including mothers, fathers, adults with caring responsibility and children to make the best and most realistic choice of secondary school.

Choice Advisers will advise parents but will not decide for them. They will act independently from the local authority.

Their aim is to help families optimise their school choices using all the information to hand and use of local knowledge of what individual schools have to offer, to ensure parents are more likely to get the best place for their child. Where appropriate, this will include information about schools which might be in different local authority areas with additional advice covering local authority school admission regimes and individual schools' admission criteria.

Choice Advisers will work with families to understand their child's educational needs and interests, providing and explaining key information in order to help them make an informed choice.

Some examples of information which may be discussed are:

• How the admissions system works
• Admissions policies for different types of schools
• Performance and value-added data
• School Ofsted reports
• Oversubscription criteria
• School's offer i.e. school profile, ethos, special facilities etc
• Special needs policy and provision 
• School curriculum - including details of the school's specialism if a Specialist School
• Time of the school day and term dates
• Travel details
• Uniform policy
• School charging policy

All Choice Advisers will have a high level of inter-personal skills and will actively listen to parents' wishes or concerns, using appropriate and effective resources to help smooth the admissions process whenever possible.

A central component of the work of the Choice Advisers is that the advice they give is independent, impartial and in the best interest of the child.

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