School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 1 families who named Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School as their first choice did not get a place: 174 put it first and 173 of them were offered one.

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

1

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

174 first preferences for 206 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School

There is no published appeal success rate for Archbishop Ilsley Catholic 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 Birmingham 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 Birmingham, 10.8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 245 of 2,271 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 Birmingham.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Birmingham 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

Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School turned first-choice families away in 5 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 1 of those years. In the other 4 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 Archbishop Ilsley Catholic 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 0.64 per place 132 first choices 206 places 2016/17 0.82 per place 173 first choices 210 places 2017/18 0.89 per place 187 first choices 211 places 2018/19 0.87 per place 180 first choices 208 places 2019/20 0.84 per place 169 first choices 202 places 2020/21 0.96 per place 202 first choices 210 places 2021/22 0.8 per place 168 first choices 210 places 2022/23 1.02 per place 215 first choices 210 places 2023/24 0.81 per place 170 first choices 210 places 2024/25 0.88 per place 184 first choices 210 places 2025/26 0.94 per place 198 first choices 210 places 2026/27 0.84 per place 174 first choices 206 places
First preferences per place at Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 174 first preferences for 206 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 206 132 132 0.64
2016/17 210 173 166 0.82
2017/18 211 187 171 0.89
2018/19 208 180 159 0.87
2019/20 202 169 150 0.84
2020/21 210 202 183 0.96
2021/22 210 168 164 0.8
2022/23 210 215 185 1.02
2023/24 210 170 157 0.81
2024/25 210 184 154 0.88
2025/26 210 198 178 0.94
2026/27 206 174 173 0.84

Places offered

206

in 2026/27

Named first choice

174

645 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

99.4%

173 of 174

Offers to families outside the council

1%

3 of 206 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 103541.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School published for 2026 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 Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School, 2026 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 children (see Note 2 below) who are looked after or previously looked after (See Note 3 below)
2 Baptised Catholic children (see Note 2 below) currently attending a named feeder school (see Note 5 below).
3 Baptised Catholic children (see Note 2 below) currently living in the parish area of a named Catholic feeder school who are not currently attending the named Catholic feeder school (see Note 5 below).
4 Other Baptised Catholic children (see Note 2 below).
5 Non-Catholic children who are looked after or previously looked after (See Note 3 below).
6 Non-Catholic children currently attending a named feeder school (see Note 5 below).
7 Other Non-Catholic children

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 2026 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.

Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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

992

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,035

104.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

43

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

200

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 Archbishop Ilsley Catholic 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 Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,192 places 1,287 on roll 2010/11 1,290 places 1,290 on roll 2011/12 1,192 places 1,259 on roll 2012/13 1,192 places 1,179 on roll 2013/14 1,192 places 1,157 on roll 2014/15 1,192 places 1,124 on roll 2015/16 1,192 places 1,154 on roll 2016/17 1,192 places 1,185 on roll 2017/18 1,192 places 1,178 on roll 2018/19 1,192 places 1,171 on roll 2020/21 1,192 places 1,199 on roll 2021/22 1,192 places 1,158 on roll 2022/23 1,192 places 1,157 on roll 2023/24 1,192 places 1,179 on roll 2024/25 1,192 places 1,166 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
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Birmingham

Postcode B27 7XY. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 146124).

Other contested secondary schools in Birmingham

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.