School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Finchley Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 18 families who named Finchley Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: 169 put it first and 151 of them were offered one.

Below: what an appeal in Barnet actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.

18

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

169 first preferences for 180 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Finchley Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Finchley Catholic High School, 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.

How contested this school has been

Finchley Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 8 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 5 of those years. In the other 3 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.

First preferences per place at Finchley Catholic High School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.29 per place 224 first choices 173 places 2016/17 1.05 per place 183 first choices 174 places 2017/18 1.06 per place 187 first choices 177 places 2018/19 1.07 per place 192 first choices 179 places 2019/20 0.99 per place 177 first choices 178 places 2020/21 1.01 per place 182 first choices 180 places 2021/22 0.77 per place 139 first choices 180 places 2022/23 0.89 per place 154 first choices 174 places 2023/24 0.92 per place 162 first choices 176 places 2024/25 0.8 per place 144 first choices 179 places 2025/26 0.87 per place 156 first choices 180 places 2026/27 0.94 per place 169 first choices 180 places
First preferences per place at Finchley Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 169 first preferences for 180 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Finchley Catholic High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 173 224 148 1.29
2016/17 174 183 150 1.05
2017/18 177 187 157 1.06
2018/19 179 192 145 1.07
2019/20 178 177 137 0.99
2020/21 180 182 158 1.01
2021/22 180 139 133 0.77
2022/23 174 154 146 0.89
2023/24 176 162 147 0.92
2024/25 179 144 136 0.8
2025/26 180 156 137 0.87
2026/27 180 169 151 0.94

Places offered

180

in 2026/27

Named first choice

169

439 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

89.3%

151 of 169

Offers to families outside the council

46%

82 of 180 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Finchley Catholic High School 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Finchley Catholic High School, 2027 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Baptised Catholic looked after boys and baptised Catholic boys who have been adopted (or made subject to a child arrangements order or special guardianship order) immediately following having been looked after (in the care of the local authority) as well as those boys who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted.
2 Baptised Catholic siblings of current or past pupils of the school
3 Baptised Catholic children of members of staff who are employed by the Governing Body and have been in post for at least two years, at the time of application.
4 Other baptised Catholic boys.
5 Other looked after boys and boys who were adopted (or subject to child arrangements orders or special guardianship orders) immediately following having been ‘looked after’ (in the care of the local authority) as well as those children who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and cased to be in state care as a result of being adopted.
6 Catechumens and members of an Eastern Christian Church.
7 Non-Catholic children of members of staff who are employed by the Governing Body and have been in post for two years, at the time of application.
8 Boys of other faiths or none. As mentioned in the definition section, for the purpose of clarity, the term ‘Catholic’ means a member of a church that is in full communion with the See of Rome, including the Eastern Catholic Churches. The admission of pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHC) is dealt with by a completely separate procedure. This procedure is integral to the making and maintaining of EHC plans by the pupil’s home Local Education Authority. Boys with the school named in their EHC Plan will be admitted. Details of this separate procedure are set out in the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice. […] 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.

Finchley Catholic High School'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

1,003

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

878

87.5% of capacity

Unfilled places

125

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

300

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 Finchley Catholic High School 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 Finchley Catholic High School reported 125 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 87.5% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Finchley Catholic High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,107 places 1,128 on roll 2010/11 1,107 places 1,122 on roll 2011/12 1,107 places 1,131 on roll 2012/13 1,107 places 1,126 on roll 2013/14 1,107 places 1,151 on roll 2014/15 1,107 places 1,145 on roll 2015/16 1,107 places 1,151 on roll 2016/17 1,107 places 1,144 on roll 2017/18 1,107 places 1,174 on roll 2018/19 1,107 places 1,187 on roll 2020/21 1,303 places 1,213 on roll 2021/22 1,303 places 1,200 on roll 2022/23 1,303 places 1,188 on roll 2023/24 1,303 places 1,197 on roll 2024/25 1,303 places 1,189 on roll
Whole-school figures including any sixth form, as at 1 May each year. 2019/20 is missing because the 2020 School Capacity survey was cancelled.

Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Barnet

Postcode N12 8TA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 101362).

Other contested secondary schools in Barnet

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.