School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Ilkley Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 69 families who named Ilkley Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 290 and 343 put it first.

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

1.18

first choices for every place available

343 first preferences for 290 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Ilkley Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Ilkley 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

Ilkley Grammar School turned first-choice families away in 11 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 Ilkley 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 1.09 per place 265 first choices 243 places 2016/17 1.09 per place 283 first choices 259 places 2017/18 1 per place 283 first choices 282 places 2018/19 0.93 per place 270 first choices 291 places 2019/20 1.1 per place 353 first choices 322 places 2020/21 1.13 per place 344 first choices 305 places 2021/22 1.05 per place 330 first choices 314 places 2022/23 1.08 per place 335 first choices 311 places 2023/24 1.12 per place 343 first choices 307 places 2024/25 1.07 per place 333 first choices 311 places 2025/26 1.16 per place 354 first choices 305 places 2026/27 1.18 per place 343 first choices 290 places
First preferences per place at Ilkley Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 343 first preferences for 290 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Ilkley 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
2015/16 243 265 238 1.09
2016/17 259 283 253 1.09
2017/18 282 283 272 1
2018/19 291 270 263 0.93
2019/20 322 353 310 1.1
2020/21 305 344 297 1.13
2021/22 314 330 304 1.05
2022/23 311 335 305 1.08
2023/24 307 343 306 1.12
2024/25 311 333 305 1.07
2025/26 305 354 296 1.16
2026/27 290 343 274 1.18

Places offered

290

in 2026/27

Named first choice

343

839 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

79.9%

274 of 343

Offers to families outside the council

3%

8 of 290 offers

How close you had to live

Ilkley Grammar School filled its places in 2025, and 6,460m — 4.01 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 2 criterion.

Last place offered at

4.01 mi

6,460 metres, 2025

Under criterion

non-sibling allocations in priority area 2

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

1,466

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,572

107.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

106

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

565

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 Ilkley 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 Ilkley 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Ilkley Grammar School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,100 2,200 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,558 places 1,551 on roll 2012/13 1,558 places 1,535 on roll 2013/14 1,558 places 1,543 on roll 2014/15 1,558 places 1,532 on roll 2015/16 1,558 places 1,539 on roll 2016/17 1,558 places 1,602 on roll 2017/18 1,618 places 1,689 on roll 2018/19 1,618 places 1,742 on roll 2020/21 1,960 places 1,949 on roll 2021/22 1,960 places 2,021 on roll 2022/23 1,960 places 2,085 on roll 2023/24 2,165 places 2,128 on roll 2024/25 2,031 places 2,164 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
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Bradford

Postcode LS29 8TR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136905).

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.