School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Carlton Bolling?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 91 families who named Carlton Bolling as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 288 and 365 put it first.

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

1.27

first choices for every place available

365 first preferences for 288 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Carlton Bolling

There is no published appeal success rate for Carlton Bolling, 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

Carlton Bolling turned first-choice families away in 8 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 7 of those years. In the other 1 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.

First preferences per place at Carlton Bolling, 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 192 first choices 239 places 2016/17 0.84 per place 201 first choices 239 places 2017/18 0.68 per place 189 first choices 279 places 2018/19 0.78 per place 231 first choices 296 places 2019/20 0.92 per place 285 first choices 310 places 2020/21 1.09 per place 354 first choices 325 places 2021/22 1.02 per place 331 first choices 324 places 2022/23 1.18 per place 359 first choices 304 places 2023/24 1.19 per place 387 first choices 324 places 2024/25 1.2 per place 381 first choices 317 places 2025/26 1.41 per place 404 first choices 287 places 2026/27 1.27 per place 365 first choices 288 places
First preferences per place at Carlton Bolling. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 365 first preferences for 288 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Carlton Bolling, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 239 192 192 0.8
2016/17 239 201 191 0.84
2017/18 279 189 189 0.68
2018/19 296 231 227 0.78
2019/20 310 285 243 0.92
2020/21 325 354 279 1.09
2021/22 324 331 280 1.02
2022/23 304 359 267 1.18
2023/24 324 387 294 1.19
2024/25 317 381 286 1.2
2025/26 287 404 265 1.41
2026/27 288 365 274 1.27

Places offered

288

in 2026/27

Named first choice

365

712 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75.1%

274 of 365

Offers to families outside the council

1%

3 of 288 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 107413.

How close you had to live

Carlton Bolling filled its places in 2025, and 1,006m — 0.63 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the non-sibling allocations in priority area criterion.

Last place offered at

0.63 mi

1,006 metres, 2025

Under criterion

non-sibling allocations in priority area

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

1,650

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,626

98.5% of capacity

Unfilled places

24

across Years 7 to 11

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 Carlton Bolling 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 Carlton Bolling reported 24 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.5% 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 Carlton Bolling from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,490 places 1,423 on roll 2010/11 1,490 places 1,454 on roll 2011/12 1,493 places 1,485 on roll 2012/13 1,493 places 1,454 on roll 2013/14 1,493 places 1,474 on roll 2014/15 1,476 places 1,447 on roll 2015/16 1,476 places 1,451 on roll 2016/17 1,476 places 1,505 on roll 2017/18 1,564 places 1,545 on roll 2018/19 1,524 places 1,481 on roll 2020/21 1,524 places 1,574 on roll 2021/22 1,524 places 1,619 on roll 2022/23 1,524 places 1,626 on roll 2023/24 1,524 places 1,637 on roll 2024/25 1,650 places 1,626 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.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Carlton Bolling has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Carlton Bolling. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
23 September 2025 No fault found ADA4478

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

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
Bradford

Postcode BD3 0DU. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 147100).

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.