Refused a place at Ark Pioneer Academy?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 28 families who named Ark Pioneer Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 167 put it first and 139 of them were offered one.
Below: what an appeal in Barnet actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 7 years of official figures.
first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27
167 first preferences for 170 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Ark Pioneer Academy
There is no published appeal success rate for Ark Pioneer Academy, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Barnet as a whole and cover every state-funded school in the authority. Anyone quoting you odds for a named school is making them up.
Across Barnet, 15.1% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 61 of 405 appeals heard in 2024–2026. The England figure is 20.1%.
A panel is not deciding whether you want the school. It decides whether the admission arrangements were lawful and correctly applied, and then whether the harm to your child of not being admitted outweighs the harm to the school of going over its published number. Cases built on preference rather than on those two questions are the ones that fail.
See the full appeal figures for Barnet.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not Barnet ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
Ark Pioneer Academy turned first-choice families away in 5 of the last 7 years. More families named it first than it had places in 3 of those years. In the other 2 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020/21 | 175 | 99 | 93 | 0.57 |
| 2021/22 | 176 | 101 | 94 | 0.57 |
| 2022/23 | 177 | 144 | 109 | 0.81 |
| 2023/24 | 177 | 183 | 140 | 1.03 |
| 2024/25 | 178 | 220 | 159 | 1.24 |
| 2025/26 | 177 | 216 | 142 | 1.22 |
| 2026/27 | 170 | 167 | 139 | 0.98 |
Places offered
170
in 2026/27
Named first choice
167
865 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
83.2%
139 of 167
Offers to families outside the council
3%
5 of 170 offers
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria Ark Pioneer Academy published for 2027 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | ‘Looked After Children’2 and children who have previously been a ‘Looked After Child’ but immediately following this became subject to adoption, a child arrangements order or special guardianship order, including those who appear (to Ark Schools) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted3. ii. Children of staff at the academy where the member of staff has been recruited to a post where there is a demonstrable skill shortage. Ark Schools must approve the Principal’s assessment process and designation of such posts to confirm the staff members’ eligibility under this criterion. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 2 | Distance measurement – Priority will be given to those children who live closest to the school. The Local Authority measures distance on behalf of Ark Schools. London Borough of Barnet use Ordinance Survey and Synergy Admissions and Transfers system to calculate distance between the child’s home and the main entrance to the academy. Further information about how the Local Authority calculate distance is detailed on the admissions guide, available on the Barnet website, link at section 9 of this policy. PLEASE NOTE: A child’s home will be the address at which the child normally resides and which has been notified to relevant agencies (e.g. […] criterion continues in the source document |
The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.
Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal
A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.
So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.
These are the criteria determined for 2027 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.
Ark Pioneer Academy's determined admission arrangements for 2027 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.
Was the school full?
This is the question a panel spends most of its time on. At the second stage of an appeal it weighs the harm to the school of taking an extra child against the harm to your child of being refused — and how much room the school has is the heart of that. The admission authority has to show harm over and above the fact that its published number has been reached, so it is fair to ask what the specific harm is — how the second stage actually works.
Places, Years 7 to 11
903
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
890
98.6% of capacity
Unfilled places
13
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
190
excluded from the figures above
Read this before you use these numbers
These are whole-school figures across Years 7 to 11, not the year group you are appealing for. A school can hold spare places in its upper years while the year you want is genuinely full, and the panel will have the year-group numbers in front of it. So this does not show that Ark Pioneer Academy has room for your child.
They are also the school's own reported capacity, as at 1 May 2025 — a year behind the application figures further up this page, and a description rather than a finding.
On the published figures Ark Pioneer Academy reported 13 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.6% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.
Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2020/21 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. Barnet does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Free schools
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- Faith
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Barnet
Postcode EN5 2BE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 147061).
Other contested secondary schools in Barnet
- Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet 2.25 first choices per place
- St Mary's and St John's CofE School 2.02 first choices per place
- Wren Academy Finchley 1.90 first choices per place
- The Henrietta Barnett School 1.83 first choices per place
- JCoSS 1.80 first choices per place
- The Archer Academy 1.66 first choices per place
- Hasmonean High School for Boys 1.49 first choices per place
- Menorah High School for Girls 1.42 first choices per place
Applications and offers: Department for Education, Primary and secondary school applications and offers, school-level file, 2026/27. Appeal figures: Admission appeals in England. Both under the Open Government Licence.