School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 78 families who named Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 123 and 191 put it first.

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

1.55

first choices for every place available

191 first preferences for 123 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy, 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

Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.6 1.3 1.9 2.5 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.82 per place 218 first choices 120 places 2016/17 1.85 per place 220 first choices 119 places 2017/18 2.23 per place 270 first choices 121 places 2018/19 1.92 per place 230 first choices 120 places 2019/20 1.85 per place 222 first choices 120 places 2020/21 1.6 per place 189 first choices 118 places 2021/22 1.57 per place 188 first choices 120 places 2022/23 1.6 per place 190 first choices 119 places 2023/24 1.48 per place 197 first choices 133 places 2024/25 1.69 per place 211 first choices 125 places 2025/26 1.88 per place 240 first choices 128 places 2026/27 1.55 per place 191 first choices 123 places
First preferences per place at Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 191 first preferences for 123 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 120 218 105 1.82
2016/17 119 220 95 1.85
2017/18 121 270 103 2.23
2018/19 120 230 105 1.92
2019/20 120 222 100 1.85
2020/21 118 189 108 1.6
2021/22 120 188 101 1.57
2022/23 119 190 110 1.6
2023/24 133 197 119 1.48
2024/25 125 211 114 1.69
2025/26 128 240 120 1.88
2026/27 123 191 113 1.55

Places offered

123

in 2026/27

Named first choice

191

467 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

59.2%

113 of 191

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 123 offers

How close you had to live

Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy filled its places in 2025, and 1,736m — 1.08 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

1.08 mi

1,736 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

590

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

645

109.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

55

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

180

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 Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy 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 Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 707 places 633 on roll 2012/13 707 places 634 on roll 2013/14 707 places 663 on roll 2014/15 707 places 675 on roll 2015/16 707 places 719 on roll 2016/17 720 places 752 on roll 2017/18 800 places 775 on roll 2018/19 770 places 812 on roll 2020/21 770 places 772 on roll 2021/22 770 places 793 on roll 2022/23 770 places 793 on roll 2023/24 770 places 800 on roll 2024/25 770 places 812 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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Bradford

Postcode BD3 0LT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136962).

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.