School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bingley Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 54 families who named Bingley Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: 266 put it first and 212 of them were offered one.

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

54

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

266 first preferences for 282 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bingley Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Bingley Grammar 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 Bradford 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 Bradford, 13.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 254 of 1,912 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 Bradford.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Bradford 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

Bingley Grammar 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 Bingley Grammar 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 0.83 per place 247 first choices 296 places 2016/17 0.8 per place 237 first choices 296 places 2017/18 0.88 per place 261 first choices 298 places 2018/19 0.82 per place 239 first choices 293 places 2019/20 0.83 per place 281 first choices 339 places 2020/21 0.75 per place 224 first choices 300 places 2021/22 0.81 per place 265 first choices 328 places 2022/23 0.73 per place 237 first choices 323 places 2023/24 0.86 per place 280 first choices 327 places 2024/25 0.83 per place 266 first choices 319 places 2025/26 0.87 per place 276 first choices 318 places 2026/27 0.94 per place 266 first choices 282 places
First preferences per place at Bingley Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 266 first preferences for 282 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bingley Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 296 247 223 0.83
2016/17 296 237 211 0.8
2017/18 298 261 234 0.88
2018/19 293 239 211 0.82
2019/20 339 281 227 0.83
2020/21 300 224 194 0.75
2021/22 328 265 241 0.81
2022/23 323 237 215 0.73
2023/24 327 280 258 0.86
2024/25 319 266 226 0.83
2025/26 318 276 240 0.87
2026/27 282 266 212 0.94

Places offered

282

in 2026/27

Named first choice

266

1,129 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

79.7%

212 of 266

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 282 offers

How close you had to live

Bingley Grammar School filled its places in 2025, and 5,275m — 3.28 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the allocations on distance criterion.

Last place offered at

3.28 mi

5,275 metres, 2025

Under criterion

allocations on 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.

Bradford 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

1,500

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,632

108.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

132

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

300

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 Bingley Grammar 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 Bingley Grammar 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Bingley Grammar School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,000 2,000 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,878 places 1,891 on roll 2010/11 1,878 places 1,877 on roll 2011/12 1,878 places 1,859 on roll 2012/13 1,878 places 1,823 on roll 2013/14 1,878 places 1,806 on roll 2014/15 1,809 places 1,781 on roll 2015/16 1,809 places 1,746 on roll 2016/17 1,809 places 1,801 on roll 2017/18 1,800 places 1,814 on roll 2018/19 1,800 places 1,815 on roll 2020/21 1,800 places 1,878 on roll 2021/22 1,800 places 1,906 on roll 2022/23 1,800 places 1,913 on roll 2023/24 1,800 places 1,936 on roll 2024/25 1,800 places 1,963 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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Bradford

Postcode BD16 2RS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 107439).

Other contested secondary schools in Bradford

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.