School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Swanshurst School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 43 families who named Swanshurst School as their first choice did not get a place: 312 put it first and 269 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.

43

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

312 first preferences for 329 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Swanshurst School

There is no published appeal success rate for Swanshurst 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

Swanshurst School turned first-choice families away in 8 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 Swanshurst 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 0.8 per place 240 first choices 300 places 2016/17 0.75 per place 223 first choices 299 places 2017/18 0.82 per place 246 first choices 300 places 2018/19 0.75 per place 224 first choices 298 places 2019/20 0.88 per place 289 first choices 328 places 2020/21 0.92 per place 304 first choices 330 places 2021/22 0.94 per place 281 first choices 300 places 2022/23 0.96 per place 286 first choices 298 places 2023/24 0.78 per place 280 first choices 359 places 2024/25 0.86 per place 281 first choices 328 places 2025/26 0.87 per place 284 first choices 328 places 2026/27 0.95 per place 312 first choices 329 places
First preferences per place at Swanshurst School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 312 first preferences for 329 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Swanshurst School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 300 240 217 0.8
2016/17 299 223 203 0.75
2017/18 300 246 211 0.82
2018/19 298 224 210 0.75
2019/20 328 289 237 0.88
2020/21 330 304 246 0.92
2021/22 300 281 221 0.94
2022/23 298 286 232 0.96
2023/24 359 280 273 0.78
2024/25 328 281 248 0.86
2025/26 328 284 252 0.87
2026/27 329 312 269 0.95

Places offered

329

in 2026/27

Named first choice

312

1,012 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

86.2%

269 of 312

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 329 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 103514.

How close you had to live

Swanshurst School filled its places in 2025, and 3,267m — 2.03 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

2.03 mi

3,267 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

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 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

1,662

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,629

98% of capacity

Unfilled places

33

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

400

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 Swanshurst 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 Swanshurst School reported 33 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98% 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 Swanshurst School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,050 2,100 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,652 places 1,739 on roll 2010/11 1,652 places 1,745 on roll 2011/12 1,652 places 1,757 on roll 2012/13 1,652 places 1,776 on roll 2013/14 1,781 places 1,778 on roll 2014/15 1,781 places 1,760 on roll 2015/16 1,781 places 1,741 on roll 2016/17 1,781 places 1,761 on roll 2017/18 1,781 places 1,758 on roll 2018/19 1,781 places 1,801 on roll 2020/21 1,820 places 1,822 on roll 2021/22 1,820 places 1,829 on roll 2022/23 1,820 places 1,866 on roll 2023/24 1,820 places 1,906 on roll 2024/25 2,062 places 1,915 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
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Birmingham

Postcode B13 0TW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 151403).

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.