School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Yardleys School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 34 families who named Yardleys School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 189 and 203 put it first.

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

1.07

first choices for every place available

203 first preferences for 189 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Yardleys School

There is no published appeal success rate for Yardleys 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

Yardleys School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Yardleys 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 1.22 per place 220 first choices 180 places 2016/17 1.28 per place 229 first choices 179 places 2017/18 1.17 per place 211 first choices 180 places 2018/19 0.93 per place 195 first choices 209 places 2019/20 1.31 per place 234 first choices 179 places 2020/21 1.44 per place 258 first choices 179 places 2021/22 1.22 per place 219 first choices 180 places 2022/23 1.1 per place 209 first choices 190 places 2023/24 1.16 per place 220 first choices 190 places 2024/25 1.09 per place 203 first choices 187 places 2025/26 1.16 per place 219 first choices 189 places 2026/27 1.07 per place 203 first choices 189 places
First preferences per place at Yardleys School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 203 first preferences for 189 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Yardleys School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 180 220 154 1.22
2016/17 179 229 159 1.28
2017/18 180 211 154 1.17
2018/19 209 195 177 0.93
2019/20 179 234 162 1.31
2020/21 179 258 164 1.44
2021/22 180 219 159 1.22
2022/23 190 209 165 1.1
2023/24 190 220 182 1.16
2024/25 187 203 171 1.09
2025/26 189 219 174 1.16
2026/27 189 203 169 1.07

Places offered

189

in 2026/27

Named first choice

203

1,103 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

83.3%

169 of 203

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 189 offers

How close you had to live

Yardleys School filled its places in 2025, and 1,245m — 0.77 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

0.77 mi

1,245 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

Range across years with a cut-off

0.77–0.87 mi

3 years, 2023 to 2025

The last place offered at Yardleys 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 0.77 miles (1,245m) Distance
2024 0.87 miles (1,394m) Distance
2023 0.82 miles (1,317m) 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 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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

927

103% of capacity

Over its capacity by

27

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 Yardleys 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 Yardleys School 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Yardleys School from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 900 places 910 on roll 2014/15 900 places 915 on roll 2015/16 900 places 898 on roll 2016/17 900 places 906 on roll 2017/18 900 places 905 on roll 2018/19 900 places 930 on roll 2020/21 900 places 929 on roll 2021/22 900 places 935 on roll 2022/23 900 places 946 on roll 2023/24 900 places 922 on roll 2024/25 900 places 927 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 B11 3EY. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139994).

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.