School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at E-ACT Heartlands Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 37 families who named E-ACT Heartlands Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 148 and 173 put it first.

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

1.17

first choices for every place available

173 first preferences for 148 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at E-ACT Heartlands Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for E-ACT Heartlands 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 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

E-ACT Heartlands Academy turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 10 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.

First preferences per place at E-ACT Heartlands 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 1.17 per place 175 first choices 149 places 2016/17 1.49 per place 224 first choices 150 places 2017/18 1.44 per place 216 first choices 150 places 2018/19 1.14 per place 206 first choices 181 places 2019/20 1.07 per place 188 first choices 176 places 2020/21 1.51 per place 227 first choices 150 places 2021/22 1.44 per place 214 first choices 149 places 2022/23 1.3 per place 194 first choices 149 places 2023/24 0.93 per place 168 first choices 180 places 2024/25 0.81 per place 145 first choices 180 places 2025/26 1.16 per place 174 first choices 150 places 2026/27 1.17 per place 173 first choices 148 places
First preferences per place at E-ACT Heartlands Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 173 first preferences for 148 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at E-ACT Heartlands Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 149 175 124 1.17
2016/17 150 224 134 1.49
2017/18 150 216 130 1.44
2018/19 181 206 154 1.14
2019/20 176 188 147 1.07
2020/21 150 227 134 1.51
2021/22 149 214 134 1.44
2022/23 149 194 128 1.3
2023/24 180 168 138 0.93
2024/25 180 145 130 0.81
2025/26 150 174 127 1.16
2026/27 148 173 136 1.17

Places offered

148

in 2026/27

Named first choice

173

633 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

78.6%

136 of 173

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 148 offers

How close you had to live

E-ACT Heartlands Academy filled its places in 2025, and 966m — 0.60 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

0.60 mi

966 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

Range across years with a cut-off

0.60–1.16 mi

3 years, 2023 to 2025

The last place offered at E-ACT Heartlands Academy, 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 0.60 miles (966m) Distance
2024 1.16 miles (1,861m) Distance
2023 0.93 miles (1,499m) 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 moves a great deal. Across the years published here it has ranged from 0.60 to 1.16 miles — a 1.9-fold spread — because it is set by who happened to apply that year, 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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria E-ACT Heartlands 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 E-ACT Heartlands 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 PRIORITY 1: Highest priority will be given to looked-after children and all previously looked-after children who apply for a place at the school.
2 PRIORITY 2: Priority will next be given to children who will have siblings on the roll of the school at the point of the new pupil joining the school.
3 PRIORITY 3: Priority will next be given to children who attend named feeder schools. Our named feeder school is E-ACT Nechells Primary Academy.
4 PRIORITY 4: Priority will next be given to children of staff employed by E-ACT at the school, in either of the following circumstances:
5 The member of staff has been employed at the school for 2 or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made.
6 The member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. For the purposes of this criterion, ‘employed at the school’ means that the employee’s principal place of work is the school to which they are applying for a place for their child.
7 PRIORITY 5: Priority will next be given to children living nearest to the school. Distance will be measured in accordance with the methodology used by the Local Authority in which the school is situated for determining home-to-school distances for admission purposes. Details of how the Local Authority measures distance can be found on the relevant Local Authority’s website. The Trust does not determine or verify distance measurements independently of the Local Authority.

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.

E-ACT Heartlands 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

832

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

833

100.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

1

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

110

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 E-ACT Heartlands 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 E-ACT Heartlands 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at E-ACT Heartlands Academy from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 950 places 668 on roll 2010/11 950 places 682 on roll 2011/12 950 places 749 on roll 2012/13 950 places 811 on roll 2013/14 950 places 837 on roll 2014/15 950 places 871 on roll 2015/16 950 places 906 on roll 2016/17 950 places 900 on roll 2017/18 950 places 875 on roll 2018/19 950 places 855 on roll 2020/21 950 places 816 on roll 2021/22 950 places 798 on roll 2022/23 950 places 794 on roll 2023/24 950 places 835 on roll 2024/25 942 places 833 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Birmingham

Postcode B7 4QR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 135907).

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.