Refused a place at King's Leadership Academy Bolton?
In 2026/27, King's Leadership Academy Bolton offered 176 places and 129 families named it as their first choice.
Below: what an appeal in Bolton actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 7 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
129 first preferences for 176 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at King's Leadership Academy Bolton
There is no published appeal success rate for King's Leadership Academy Bolton, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Bolton 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 Bolton, 22% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 192 of 873 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 Bolton.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not Bolton ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
King's Leadership Academy Bolton turned first-choice families away in 5 of the last 7 years. More families named it first than it had places in 2 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020/21 | 179 | 158 | 132 | 0.88 |
| 2021/22 | 179 | 183 | 136 | 1.02 |
| 2022/23 | 178 | 182 | 131 | 1.02 |
| 2023/24 | 190 | 160 | 142 | 0.84 |
| 2024/25 | 176 | 174 | 128 | 0.99 |
| 2025/26 | 186 | 156 | 141 | 0.84 |
| 2026/27 | 176 | 129 | 129 | 0.73 |
Places offered
176
in 2026/27
Named first choice
129
444 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
100%
129 of 129
Offers to families outside the council
0%
0 of 172 offers
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria King's Leadership Academy Bolton 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Looked after children, previously looked after children and those allocated a place at the school in accordance with a Fair Access Protocol must take precedence over those on the waiting list. |
| 2 | Bolton Local Authority will also liaise with the voluntary aided schools, free schools and academies which are oversubscribed who will operate their own waiting lists until 31 December 2027 for applicants whose initial request has been unsuccessful. Should any places become available the Local Authority will contact the school concerned and the place will be allocated in accordance with the published admission criteria for that school. |
| 3 | Length of time on the waiting list will not be seen as a relevant factor. |
| 4 | Children can only be on the waiting list for up to three schools at one time. |
| 5 | After 31 December, if a parent wishes for their child to remain on a waiting list for a school, they will need to make a new application using the in -year admissions process. Change of preferences |
| 6 | A parent may change their preferences at any point up until the closing date for applications (31 October 2026 for Secondary or 15 January 2027 for primary). They can do this by amending and resubmitting their online application, or else by emailing the School Admissions Team before the closing date. |
| 7 | If a parent makes an on-time application, they may change the order of those preferences after the closing date by emailing the School Admission Team. This will only be possible until the offer process is initiated (30 November for secondary, and 15 February for primary) |
| 8 | A change of preference (i.e. adding new preferences) after the closing date will only be acceptable in exceptionable circumstances. This is likely to be where there is a significant change in address. Verification must be provided e.g. letter from the solicitor exchanging contracts or a tenancy agreement together with evidence to confirm permanent residency at the new address. The local authority cannot change preference for whatever reason after 30 November (secondary) or 15 February (primary) until after the offer day (1 March for secondary, 16 April for primary). Applications outside the normal year of entry |
| 9 | Parents/carers may occasionally apply for their child to be admitted outside their normal age group (i.e. to the year above if the child is gifted or talented or to a lower year if the child has special educational needs or has experienced problems or is a |
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.
King's Leadership Academy Bolton'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
900
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
908
100.9% of capacity
Over its capacity by
8
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 King's Leadership Academy Bolton 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 King's Leadership Academy Bolton 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, 2020/21 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. Bolton does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Free schools
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Bolton
Postcode BL3 3HL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 147077).
Other contested secondary schools in Bolton
- Eden Boys' School, Bolton 1.66 first choices per place
- St James's Church of England High School 1.60 first choices per place
- Sharples School 1.46 first choices per place
- Bolton Muslim Girls School 1.29 first choices per place
- Essa Academy 1.11 first choices per place
- St Joseph's RC High School 1.06 first choices per place
- Rivington and Blackrod High School 1.01 first choices per place
- Canon Slade School 1 first choices per place
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.