School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Tile Cross Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 18 families who named Tile Cross Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 113 put it first and 95 of them were offered one.

Below: what an appeal in Birmingham actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 9 years of official figures.

18

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

113 first preferences for 123 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Tile Cross Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Tile Cross Academy, 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

Tile Cross Academy turned first-choice families away in 3 of the last 9 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 Tile Cross Academy, 2018/19 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 18/19 20/21 22/23 24/25 26/27 2018/19 0.29 per place 24 first choices 84 places 2019/20 0.31 per place 34 first choices 109 places 2020/21 0.46 per place 49 first choices 107 places 2021/22 0.53 per place 51 first choices 96 places 2022/23 0.6 per place 72 first choices 120 places 2023/24 0.54 per place 79 first choices 147 places 2024/25 0.86 per place 103 first choices 120 places 2025/26 0.86 per place 108 first choices 126 places 2026/27 0.92 per place 113 first choices 123 places
First preferences per place at Tile Cross Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 113 first preferences for 123 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Tile Cross Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2018/19 84 24 23 0.29
2019/20 109 34 34 0.31
2020/21 107 49 44 0.46
2021/22 96 51 51 0.53
2022/23 120 72 72 0.6
2023/24 147 79 79 0.54
2024/25 120 103 86 0.86
2025/26 126 108 93 0.86
2026/27 123 113 95 0.92

Places offered

123

in 2026/27

Named first choice

113

499 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

84.1%

95 of 113

Offers to families outside the council

2%

3 of 123 offers

How close you had to live

Tile Cross Academy filled its places in 2025, and 1,983m — 1.23 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

1.23 mi

1,983 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

Range across years with a cut-off

1.01–1.23 mi

2 years, 2024 to 2025

The last place offered at Tile Cross Academy, 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 1.23 miles (1,983m) Distance
2024 1.01 miles (1,627m) 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 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 2024–2025. 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

608

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

617

101.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

9

reported as full or beyond

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 Tile Cross Academy 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 Tile Cross Academy 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, 2016/17 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Tile Cross Academy from 2016/17 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 16/17 17/18 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2016/17 840 places 630 on roll 2017/18 600 places 603 on roll 2018/19 600 places 559 on roll 2020/21 600 places 570 on roll 2021/22 608 places 576 on roll 2022/23 608 places 580 on roll 2023/24 608 places 616 on roll 2024/25 608 places 617 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 B33 9UF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 144306).

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.