School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at King Edward VI Aston School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 73 families who named King Edward VI Aston School as their first choice did not get a place: 143 put it first and 70 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.

73

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

143 first preferences for 146 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at King Edward VI Aston School

There is no published appeal success rate for King Edward VI Aston 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

King Edward VI Aston School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 5 of those years. In the other 7 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 King Edward VI Aston School, 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 2.09 per place 249 first choices 119 places 2016/17 1.51 per place 177 first choices 117 places 2017/18 1.01 per place 138 first choices 136 places 2018/19 0.86 per place 114 first choices 133 places 2019/20 1.02 per place 125 first choices 123 places 2020/21 0.86 per place 119 first choices 138 places 2021/22 0.78 per place 109 first choices 139 places 2022/23 0.76 per place 106 first choices 140 places 2023/24 0.81 per place 112 first choices 139 places 2024/25 1.02 per place 141 first choices 138 places 2025/26 0.8 per place 112 first choices 140 places 2026/27 0.98 per place 143 first choices 146 places
First preferences per place at King Edward VI Aston School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 143 first preferences for 146 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at King Edward VI Aston School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 119 249 63 2.09
2016/17 117 177 44 1.51
2017/18 136 138 47 1.01
2018/19 133 114 56 0.86
2019/20 123 125 41 1.02
2020/21 138 119 64 0.86
2021/22 139 109 52 0.78
2022/23 140 106 57 0.76
2023/24 139 112 47 0.81
2024/25 138 141 63 1.02
2025/26 140 112 47 0.8
2026/27 146 143 70 0.98

Places offered

146

in 2026/27

Named first choice

143

1,036 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

49%

70 of 143

Offers to families outside the council

20%

29 of 146 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria King Edward VI Aston 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 King Edward VI Aston 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 “Looked after” or “previously looked after” children. Applicants in this category will be ranked by distance from the school (according to straight-line distance between home and school calculated via Google Maps or equivalent);
2 Candidates who are eligible for Pupil Premium funding in Year 11, up to a maximum of 25% of the total places available for external applicants, ranked by distance from the school (according to straight-line distance between home and school calculated via Google Maps or equivalent);
3 Candidates who have achieved the highest average point score across all GCSE subjects taken, ranked by score and then by distance if necessary. In a very small number of cases it may not be possible to decide between the applications of those pupils who are the final qualifiers for a place, when applying the published admission criteria. For example, this may occur when children in the same year group live at the same address, or where there are twins, or if the distance between the home and school is exactly the same, for example, blocks of flats. […] criterion continues in the source document

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.

King Edward VI Aston 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

624

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

701

112.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

77

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

300

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 King Edward VI Aston 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 King Edward VI Aston 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at King Edward VI Aston School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 801 places 758 on roll 2012/13 801 places 753 on roll 2013/14 810 places 761 on roll 2014/15 810 places 778 on roll 2015/16 810 places 800 on roll 2016/17 860 places 845 on roll 2017/18 870 places 875 on roll 2018/19 870 places 914 on roll 2020/21 980 places 986 on roll 2021/22 1,000 places 989 on roll 2022/23 924 places 1,001 on roll 2023/24 924 places 998 on roll 2024/25 924 places 998 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. King Edward VI Aston School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming King Edward VI Aston School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
6 July 2017 No fault found ADA3263
12 June 2014 Arrangements did not comply ADA/2612

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
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Birmingham

Postcode B6 6DJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137043).

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.