School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 9 families who named St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School as their first choice did not get a place: 176 put it first and 167 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

176 first preferences for 209 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School

There is no published appeal success rate for St Thomas Aquinas Catholic 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

St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School turned first-choice families away in 1 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 St Thomas Aquinas Catholic 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 0.68 per place 142 first choices 210 places 2016/17 0.73 per place 154 first choices 210 places 2017/18 0.7 per place 146 first choices 209 places 2018/19 0.67 per place 123 first choices 184 places 2019/20 0.61 per place 124 first choices 204 places 2020/21 0.77 per place 141 first choices 183 places 2021/22 0.64 per place 111 first choices 174 places 2022/23 0.64 per place 129 first choices 201 places 2023/24 0.81 per place 170 first choices 210 places 2024/25 0.98 per place 206 first choices 210 places 2025/26 0.76 per place 156 first choices 205 places 2026/27 0.84 per place 176 first choices 209 places
First preferences per place at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 176 first preferences for 209 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 210 142 139 0.68
2016/17 210 154 153 0.73
2017/18 209 146 141 0.7
2018/19 184 123 116 0.67
2019/20 204 124 124 0.61
2020/21 183 141 132 0.77
2021/22 174 111 111 0.64
2022/23 201 129 129 0.64
2023/24 210 170 157 0.81
2024/25 210 206 182 0.98
2025/26 205 156 155 0.76
2026/27 209 176 167 0.84

Places offered

209

in 2026/27

Named first choice

176

823 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

94.9%

167 of 176

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 209 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 103533.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School 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 St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School, 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 Baptised Catholic children (see Note 2 below) who are looked after or previously looked after (See Note 3 below)
2 Baptised Catholic children (see Note 2 below) of a member of staff working for St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School (see Note 8 below)
3 Baptised Catholic children (see Note 2 below) currently attending a Lumen Christi School (see Note 5 below).
4 Baptised Catholic children (see Note 2 below) currently attending a named feeder school (see Note 6 below).
5 Other Baptised Catholic children (see note 2 below).
6 Non-Catholic children who are looked after or previously looked after (See Note 3 below)
7 Non-Catholic children of a member of staff working for St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School (see Note 8 below)
8 Non-Catholic children currently attending a Lumen Christi School (see Note 5 below).
9 Non-Catholic children currently attending a named feeder school (see Note 6 below). 10.Other Non-Catholic children.

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.

St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School'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

1,039

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,009

97.1% of capacity

Unfilled places

30

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

200

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 St Thomas Aquinas Catholic 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 St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School reported 30 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 97.1% 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 St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School 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 1,239 places 1,237 on roll 2010/11 1,239 places 1,217 on roll 2011/12 1,239 places 1,211 on roll 2012/13 1,239 places 1,210 on roll 2013/14 1,239 places 1,180 on roll 2014/15 1,239 places 1,160 on roll 2015/16 1,239 places 1,141 on roll 2016/17 1,239 places 1,150 on roll 2017/18 1,239 places 1,155 on roll 2018/19 1,239 places 1,164 on roll 2020/21 1,239 places 1,162 on roll 2021/22 1,239 places 1,148 on roll 2022/23 1,239 places 1,161 on roll 2023/24 1,239 places 1,154 on roll 2024/25 1,239 places 1,172 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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Birmingham

Postcode B38 8AP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 141835).

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.