If you have a look on your home LEA's website, you will find a description of how the Equal Preference System works.
Essentially:
- your ranking of schools matters only to you. The schools do not know (are prevented from knowing, by law) where you ranked them
- each admissions authority (may be the school itself, or the school's LEA on its behalf) ranks all the applications it receives, according to its published admissions criteria. At the same time.
- the information is fed back, LEA to LEA, to your home authority
- your home LEA looks at your ranked list and sees which of your preferences said 'yes'
- your home LEA then allocates a place to you at the 'yes' that you ranked highest on your list
- it is assumed that you have ranked schools in your use order of preference. If you say you want e.g. Stanway, then Thomas Lord Audley, then ColCHS, etc, etc, if your DD meets the requirements for a place at TLA , that is the place she will get, with a place on the waiting list at Stanway - but no waiting list place at ColCHS, because the system has been told that it was your third preference and your DD could be offered a place at higher preference school.
The algorithm does not have a function which goes, 'if any of the preferences is a grammar school, that must be their real first preference, whatever order they ranked schools in'.