School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Carlton Keighley?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 69 families who named Carlton Keighley as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 171 and 230 put it first.

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

1.35

first choices for every place available

230 first preferences for 171 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Carlton Keighley

There is no published appeal success rate for Carlton Keighley, 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 Keighley turned first-choice families away in 3 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 Carlton Keighley, 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 95 first choices 114 places 2016/17 0.85 per place 115 first choices 135 places 2017/18 0.91 per place 103 first choices 113 places 2018/19 0.97 per place 94 first choices 97 places 2019/20 0.56 per place 79 first choices 140 places 2020/21 0.84 per place 99 first choices 118 places 2021/22 0.64 per place 106 first choices 165 places 2022/23 0.93 per place 136 first choices 147 places 2023/24 0.91 per place 156 first choices 172 places 2024/25 1.35 per place 185 first choices 137 places 2025/26 1.24 per place 205 first choices 165 places 2026/27 1.35 per place 230 first choices 171 places
First preferences per place at Carlton Keighley. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 230 first preferences for 171 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Carlton Keighley, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 114 95 95 0.83
2016/17 135 115 115 0.85
2017/18 113 103 103 0.91
2018/19 97 94 93 0.97
2019/20 140 79 76 0.56
2020/21 118 99 98 0.84
2021/22 165 106 106 0.64
2022/23 147 136 135 0.93
2023/24 172 156 156 0.91
2024/25 137 185 127 1.35
2025/26 165 205 154 1.24
2026/27 171 230 161 1.35

Places offered

171

in 2026/27

Named first choice

230

406 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

70%

161 of 230

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 171 offers

How close you had to live

Carlton Keighley filled its places in 2025, and 1,511m — 0.94 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

0.94 mi

1,511 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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

794

88.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

106

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 Keighley 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 Keighley reported 106 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 88.2% 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Carlton Keighley from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,080 places 637 on roll 2011/12 1,080 places 658 on roll 2012/13 1,080 places 625 on roll 2013/14 1,080 places 647 on roll 2014/15 1,080 places 701 on roll 2015/16 1,080 places 699 on roll 2016/17 1,080 places 687 on roll 2017/18 1,080 places 655 on roll 2018/19 1,080 places 609 on roll 2020/21 900 places 635 on roll 2021/22 900 places 685 on roll 2022/23 900 places 716 on roll 2023/24 900 places 754 on roll 2024/25 900 places 794 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
Bradford

Postcode BD20 6EB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136198).

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.