School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Lift Greenwood?

In 2026/27, Lift Greenwood offered 203 places and 173 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.85

first choices for every place available

173 first preferences for 203 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Lift Greenwood

There is no published appeal success rate for Lift Greenwood, 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

Lift Greenwood turned first-choice families away in 4 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 1 of those years. In the other 3 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 Lift Greenwood, 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 0.66 per place 93 first choices 141 places 2016/17 0.69 per place 111 first choices 161 places 2017/18 0.82 per place 143 first choices 174 places 2018/19 0.9 per place 160 first choices 177 places 2019/20 0.97 per place 171 first choices 177 places 2020/21 0.99 per place 177 first choices 179 places 2021/22 0.76 per place 127 first choices 168 places 2022/23 0.8 per place 142 first choices 178 places 2023/24 0.98 per place 176 first choices 179 places 2024/25 1.12 per place 198 first choices 177 places 2025/26 0.84 per place 173 first choices 206 places 2026/27 0.85 per place 173 first choices 203 places
First preferences per place at Lift Greenwood. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 173 first preferences for 203 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Lift Greenwood, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 141 93 93 0.66
2016/17 161 111 111 0.69
2017/18 174 143 143 0.82
2018/19 177 160 141 0.9
2019/20 177 171 160 0.97
2020/21 179 177 159 0.99
2021/22 168 127 127 0.76
2022/23 178 142 138 0.8
2023/24 179 176 154 0.98
2024/25 177 198 160 1.12
2025/26 206 173 171 0.84
2026/27 203 173 173 0.85

Places offered

203

in 2026/27

Named first choice

173

449 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

173 of 173

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 202 offers

How close you had to live

Lift Greenwood filled its places in 2025, and 6,079m — 3.78 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

3.78 mi

6,079 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

Range across years with a cut-off

1.32–3.78 mi

3 years, 2023 to 2025

The last place offered at Lift Greenwood, 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 3.78 miles (6,079m) Distance
2024 1.32 miles (2,131m) Distance
2023 1.82 miles (2,926m) 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 1.32 to 3.78 miles — a 2.9-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.

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

999

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

909

91% of capacity

Unfilled places

90

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

30

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 Lift Greenwood 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 Lift Greenwood reported 90 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 91% 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Lift Greenwood from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 900 places 677 on roll 2013/14 900 places 614 on roll 2014/15 900 places 663 on roll 2015/16 900 places 734 on roll 2016/17 900 places 760 on roll 2017/18 900 places 795 on roll 2018/19 900 places 831 on roll 2020/21 960 places 941 on roll 2021/22 960 places 950 on roll 2022/23 960 places 954 on roll 2023/24 960 places 954 on roll 2024/25 1,029 places 939 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 B35 7NL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139048).

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.