The School Record

Published admissions and inspection figures for schools in England, from the DfE, Ofsted and local authorities.

Whirley Primary School

URN 140598 · Primary · Academy converter · Cheshire East

Whirley Road, Macclesfield, SK10 3JL

How many families applied

Preferences expressed and offers made at Reception, as published by the Department for Education. These describe demand. They do not indicate whether any particular child would be offered a place.

In the 2025 intake, 37 families named Whirley Primary School as their first preference, and the school made 30 offers.

That is 1.23 first preferences per place offered, which places it above 91% of schools admitting at Reception in England that year.

More first preferences per place than 91% of comparable schools position among schools in England admitting at Reception, 2025 intake

Little change. Across the 5 most recent years held, first preferences per place averaged 1.13 in 2021–2022 and 1.18 in 2024–2025.

Applications and offers at Reception, 11 intake years
Intake 1st preferences All preferences Offers made 1st prefs per place
2025 37 71 30 1.23
2024 34 70 30 1.13
2023 44 78 30 1.47
2022 25 75 26 0.96
2021 39 83 30 1.30
2020 44 99 30 1.47
2019 33 77 30 1.10
2018 43 113 30 1.43
2017 29 65 30 0.97
2016 35 87 30 1.17
2015 38 90 30 1.27

“Offers made” counts the offers the school made. It is not the number of places the school had, so please do not read it as one.

Ofsted

Ofsted changed its inspection framework: the current one publishes several graded areas and no single overall grade, while the previous one published an overall effectiveness grade. Each inspection below states which framework produced it.

Ofsted ungraded inspection, 20 July 2022

School remains Good

Ofsted's report for this school

Exam results

Published by the Department for Education for the whole year group. Figures for smaller cohorts are withheld by DfE to protect pupil privacy and appear here as a dash, not a zero.

Key stage 2 (end of primary)
Year Expected standard in reading, writing & maths Higher standard Average reading score Average maths score
2024/25 65.0% 13.0% 108.0 106.0
2023/24 71.0% 6.0% 109.0 107.0
2022/23 61.0% 6.0% 107.0 105.0

Teachers staying and leaving

These come from the School Workforce Census, which follows each teacher into the next year. The numbers count full-time jobs, so a teacher who works half the week counts as half. They are not a count of people.

Census yearTeachers (FTE) Still there a year later Moved to another state school Left state schools Left in total
2023/24 9.7 9.0 0.0 0.7 7.2%
2022/23 8.8 8.4 0.4 0.0 4.5%
2021/22 9.2 7.1 1.0 1.1 22.8%
2020/21 10.3 9.5 0.8 0.0 7.8%
2019/20 8.5 8.5 0.0 0.0 0.0%
2018/19 8.1 5.5 1.8 0.8 32.1%

This is turnover among teachers. It says nothing about the headteacher or the senior leadership team: DfE publishes leadership retention separately and we do not hold it by school.

Catchment area

Cheshire East publishes an admission zone for this school (Whirley Primary School (Part 1)).

Covers: 14 live postcodes across 1.372 km².

6 of the postcodes in this zone sit within 50 m of its edge. We place an address by its postcode centroid, not the address itself, so for those a specific house may fall the other side of the line.

The school building sits outside this area. Sometimes that is normal, because the area is drawn around the streets a school serves rather than around the school itself. But it can also mean the area has been joined to the wrong school. Treat it with care.

Cheshire East publishes an admission zone for this school (Whirley Primary School (Part 2)).

Covers: 78 live postcodes across 10.856 km².

8 of the postcodes in this zone sit within 50 m of its edge. We place an address by its postcode centroid, not the address itself, so for those a specific house may fall the other side of the line.

Where it is

The shaded shape is the area the council published for Whirley Primary School. Living inside it is not the same as being offered a place. Councils use these areas in different ways. Some use them to help decide who gets a place when a school is full. Some use them to decide who gets free school transport. Many use them for both. Check with the council which it is here. The edge is drawn to about 20 metres, so do not use it to judge a single house.

The 6 nearest primary schools we hold figures for, by straight-line distance from Whirley Primary School.

Nearby and related

Where these figures come from

This page was made on 9 September 2026. "Retrieved" means the day we downloaded the data. It is not the day the data was written, so the figures can be about an earlier year. How we compare schools.