School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Hodge Hill College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 9 families who named Hodge Hill College as their first choice did not get a place: 186 put it first and 177 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.

9

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

186 first preferences for 239 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Hodge Hill College

There is no published appeal success rate for Hodge Hill College, 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

Hodge Hill College turned first-choice families away in 7 of the last 12 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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 Hodge Hill College, 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 0.75 per place 179 first choices 240 places 2016/17 0.76 per place 181 first choices 238 places 2017/18 0.77 per place 183 first choices 238 places 2018/19 0.9 per place 210 first choices 234 places 2019/20 0.95 per place 227 first choices 238 places 2020/21 0.93 per place 223 first choices 240 places 2021/22 0.74 per place 177 first choices 239 places 2022/23 0.72 per place 174 first choices 240 places 2023/24 0.73 per place 176 first choices 240 places 2024/25 0.92 per place 217 first choices 237 places 2025/26 0.83 per place 199 first choices 239 places 2026/27 0.78 per place 186 first choices 239 places
First preferences per place at Hodge Hill College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 186 first preferences for 239 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Hodge Hill College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 240 179 169 0.75
2016/17 238 181 171 0.76
2017/18 238 183 172 0.77
2018/19 234 210 189 0.9
2019/20 238 227 204 0.95
2020/21 240 223 197 0.93
2021/22 239 177 168 0.74
2022/23 240 174 151 0.72
2023/24 240 176 158 0.73
2024/25 237 217 177 0.92
2025/26 239 199 167 0.83
2026/27 239 186 177 0.78

Places offered

239

in 2026/27

Named first choice

186

805 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

95.2%

177 of 186

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 239 offers

How close you had to live

Hodge Hill College filled its places in 2025, and 1,580m — 0.98 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

0.98 mi

1,580 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

Range across years with a cut-off

0.90–1.16 mi

3 years, 2023 to 2025

The last place offered at Hodge Hill College, 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 0.98 miles (1,580m) Distance
2024 0.90 miles (1,449m) Distance
2023 1.16 miles (1,861m) 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,199

99.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

1

across Years 7 to 11

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 Hodge Hill College 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 Hodge Hill College reported 1 unfilled place across Years 7 to 11, at 99.9% 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 Hodge Hill College 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 1,200 places 1,148 on roll 2010/11 1,200 places 1,161 on roll 2011/12 1,200 places 1,173 on roll 2012/13 1,200 places 1,170 on roll 2013/14 1,200 places 1,160 on roll 2014/15 1,200 places 1,168 on roll 2015/16 1,200 places 1,182 on roll 2016/17 1,200 places 1,197 on roll 2017/18 1,200 places 1,216 on roll 2018/19 1,200 places 1,218 on roll 2020/21 1,200 places 1,198 on roll 2021/22 1,200 places 1,215 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 1,214 on roll 2023/24 1,200 places 1,211 on roll 2024/25 1,200 places 1,199 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 B36 8HB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 103503).

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.