I think that unless the school applies for a variation to their admission policy, they would have to stick to what the published criteria are for this year. So if the categories (completely made up off the top of my head) were
- LAC / PLAC
- up to 150 girls living within 5 miles of the school, score order
- up to PAN, living anywhere, score order
then the 151st and downwards 'within 5 miles' girls would stand a better chance than if it said
- LAC/ PLAC
- up to 150 girls, living within 5 miles, score order
- remaining places, girls living further than 5 miles, score order, remaining '<5miles' places also to go to '>5 miles' residents.
The second example is what happened at DS2's school in his year (boys, not girls

), when there was a post-allocation day decision to offer 30 extra places, even though the school's overall aim was to increase the number of local places available. For subsequent years, the wording was amended to refer to percentages, not absolute numbers, so that the effect was to have a maximum of 150 places available IC (up from 125 in the year above DS2), minimum 30 available OOC (up from 25), rather than the situation in DS2's year, where all the extra places had to go to OOC applicants.