School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 23 families who named Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form as their first choice did not get a place: 108 put it first and 85 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.

23

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

108 first preferences for 124 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form

There is no published appeal success rate for Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form, 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

Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 8 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 Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.6 1.3 1.9 2.5 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 2.05 per place 244 first choices 119 places 2016/17 2.14 per place 255 first choices 119 places 2017/18 2.36 per place 278 first choices 118 places 2018/19 2.07 per place 244 first choices 118 places 2019/20 1.59 per place 212 first choices 133 places 2020/21 1.81 per place 237 first choices 131 places 2021/22 1.28 per place 157 first choices 123 places 2022/23 0.81 per place 100 first choices 123 places 2023/24 1.04 per place 129 first choices 124 places 2024/25 0.95 per place 119 first choices 125 places 2025/26 0.86 per place 104 first choices 121 places 2026/27 0.87 per place 108 first choices 124 places
First preferences per place at Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 108 first preferences for 124 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 119 244 112 2.05
2016/17 119 255 107 2.14
2017/18 118 278 112 2.36
2018/19 118 244 105 2.07
2019/20 133 212 114 1.59
2020/21 131 237 116 1.81
2021/22 123 157 107 1.28
2022/23 123 100 79 0.81
2023/24 124 129 97 1.04
2024/25 125 119 87 0.95
2025/26 121 104 83 0.86
2026/27 124 108 85 0.87

Places offered

124

in 2026/27

Named first choice

108

858 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

78.7%

85 of 108

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 124 offers

How close you had to live

Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form filled its places in 2025, and 1,234m — 0.77 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the distance criterion.

Last place offered at

0.77 mi

1,234 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

Range across years with a cut-off

0.62–0.77 mi

3 years, 2023 to 2025

The last place offered at Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form, by admission year. Each year is a separate round with its own applicants, not a trend.
Year Distance Criterion the last place went under
2025 0.77 miles (1,234m) Distance
2024 0.70 miles (1,130m) Distance
2023 0.62 miles (1,004m) Distance

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Birmingham Council, allocation statistics for 2023–2025. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

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

837

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

630

75.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

207

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

328

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 Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form 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 Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form reported 207 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 75.3% 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 Bordesley Green Girls' School & Sixth Form from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 583 places 601 on roll 2010/11 583 places 600 on roll 2011/12 783 places 728 on roll 2012/13 783 places 801 on roll 2013/14 783 places 804 on roll 2014/15 783 places 858 on roll 2015/16 783 places 930 on roll 2016/17 960 places 971 on roll 2017/18 960 places 1,000 on roll 2018/19 960 places 984 on roll 2020/21 1,000 places 1,008 on roll 2021/22 1,000 places 981 on roll 2022/23 1,000 places 974 on roll 2023/24 1,000 places 965 on roll 2024/25 1,165 places 959 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
Community school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Birmingham

Postcode B9 4TR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 103493).

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.