School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Archer Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 122 families who named The Archer Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 147 and 244 put it first.

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

1.66

first choices for every place available

244 first preferences for 147 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Archer Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for The Archer 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.

How contested this school has been

The Archer Academy turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at The Archer Academy, 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 1.47 per place 215 first choices 146 places 2016/17 1.71 per place 249 first choices 146 places 2017/18 1.69 per place 237 first choices 140 places 2018/19 1.22 per place 175 first choices 144 places 2019/20 1.36 per place 217 first choices 159 places 2020/21 1.52 per place 230 first choices 151 places 2021/22 1.65 per place 251 first choices 152 places 2022/23 1.57 per place 240 first choices 153 places 2023/24 1.76 per place 268 first choices 152 places 2024/25 1.66 per place 249 first choices 150 places 2025/26 1.51 per place 230 first choices 152 places 2026/27 1.66 per place 244 first choices 147 places
First preferences per place at The Archer Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 244 first preferences for 147 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Archer Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 146 215 123 1.47
2016/17 146 249 128 1.71
2017/18 140 237 121 1.69
2018/19 144 175 114 1.22
2019/20 159 217 127 1.36
2020/21 151 230 121 1.52
2021/22 152 251 127 1.65
2022/23 153 240 132 1.57
2023/24 152 268 132 1.76
2024/25 150 249 130 1.66
2025/26 152 230 130 1.51
2026/27 147 244 122 1.66

Places offered

147

in 2026/27

Named first choice

244

1,018 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

50%

122 of 244

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 147 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria The Archer 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.

Oversubscription criteria for The Archer Academy, 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 Looked after children (LAC) and previously looked after children (PLAC), who were adopted (or subject to child arrangement orders) immediately following having been looked after, as well as internationally adopted previously looked after children (IAPLAC), those 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 (see Note 1)
2 Children whose parents are Founders of the Archer Academy and who have been granted this provision by the Secretary of State for Education (see Note 2).
3 Children who will have siblings in the school at the time when they are admitted to the school (see Note 3).
4 Children of staff (teaching or support) of the school, provided they have been directly employed for a minimum of two years at the time at which the application for a place is made, or have been recruited to fill a post where there is a demonstrable skills shortage. (The definition of a direct employee is an employee holding a contract of employment with the school).
5 Children in the priority catchment area – which is the postcode areas N2, N3 and NW11 – as follows: 45% of places will be offered to children whose home address is within N2, 35% to children whose home address is within N3 and 20% of places to children whose home address is within NW11. Any fraction of places that remain when dividing places to each postcode will be allocated to applicants in the N2 postcode. Places will be offered to those children who live closest to the school, based on measuring distance in a straight line from the front gate of the Lower School Stanley Road campus to the address of the child’s home (see Note 4).
6 After places have been filled under the first five criteria, any remaining places will be offered on a geographical basis with priority given to children who live closest to the school, based on measuring distance in a straight line from the front gate of the Lower School Stanley Road campus to the child’s home (see Note 4).

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.

The Archer 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

750

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

803

107.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

53

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

0

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 The Archer 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 The Archer Academy was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Archer Academy from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 750 places 150 on roll 2014/15 750 places 301 on roll 2015/16 750 places 449 on roll 2016/17 750 places 600 on roll 2017/18 750 places 747 on roll 2018/19 750 places 768 on roll 2020/21 750 places 797 on roll 2021/22 750 places 802 on roll 2022/23 750 places 806 on roll 2023/24 750 places 811 on roll 2024/25 750 places 803 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.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. The Archer Academy has been the subject of 3 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in 2 of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming The Archer Academy. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
25 November 2022 No fault found ADA3971
16 August 2018 Arrangements did not comply ADA3426 to ADA3428
30 September 2016 Arrangements did not comply ADA3204, ADA3205, ADA3206, ADA3207 and ADA3208

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Barnet

Postcode N2 8GA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139594).

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.