School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Kings Heath Secondary School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 4 families who named Kings Heath Secondary School as their first choice did not get a place: 116 put it first and 112 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.

4

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

116 first preferences for 168 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Kings Heath Secondary School

There is no published appeal success rate for Kings Heath Secondary 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

Kings Heath Secondary School turned first-choice families away in 2 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 Kings Heath Secondary 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 0.35 per place 40 first choices 113 places 2016/17 0.39 per place 47 first choices 119 places 2017/18 0.38 per place 46 first choices 120 places 2018/19 0.35 per place 41 first choices 117 places 2019/20 0.45 per place 62 first choices 137 places 2020/21 0.28 per place 43 first choices 152 places 2021/22 0.37 per place 52 first choices 141 places 2022/23 0.27 per place 45 first choices 164 places 2023/24 0.39 per place 65 first choices 167 places 2024/25 0.65 per place 108 first choices 167 places 2025/26 0.75 per place 130 first choices 173 places 2026/27 0.69 per place 116 first choices 168 places
First preferences per place at Kings Heath Secondary School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 116 first preferences for 168 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Kings Heath Secondary School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 113 40 40 0.35
2016/17 119 47 44 0.39
2017/18 120 46 43 0.38
2018/19 117 41 40 0.35
2019/20 137 62 60 0.45
2020/21 152 43 41 0.28
2021/22 141 52 52 0.37
2022/23 164 45 45 0.27
2023/24 167 65 65 0.39
2024/25 167 108 88 0.65
2025/26 173 130 111 0.75
2026/27 168 116 112 0.69

Places offered

168

in 2026/27

Named first choice

116

1,043 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

96.6%

112 of 116

Offers to families outside the council

2%

4 of 168 offers

How close you had to live

Kings Heath Secondary School filled its places in 2025, and 3,205m — 1.99 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

1.99 mi

3,205 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

Years nobody was turned away

2023

every applicant offered a place, so no cut-off applied

Range across years with a cut-off

0.78–1.99 mi

2 years, 2024 to 2025

The last place offered at Kings Heath Secondary School, 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 1.99 miles (3,205m) Distance
2024 0.78 miles (1,255m) Distance
2023 None Everyone who applied was offered a place

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 0.78 to 1.99 miles — a 2.6-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.

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

840

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

780

92.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

60

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 Kings Heath Secondary 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 Kings Heath Secondary School reported 60 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 92.9% 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 Kings Heath Secondary School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 600 places 603 on roll 2010/11 600 places 587 on roll 2011/12 600 places 541 on roll 2012/13 600 places 510 on roll 2013/14 600 places 499 on roll 2014/15 600 places 534 on roll 2015/16 600 places 533 on roll 2016/17 600 places 562 on roll 2017/18 600 places 578 on roll 2018/19 600 places 594 on roll 2020/21 696 places 661 on roll 2021/22 840 places 669 on roll 2022/23 840 places 729 on roll 2023/24 840 places 782 on roll 2024/25 840 places 780 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 B13 0QP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 103486).

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.