School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Parkside School?

In 2026/27, Parkside School offered 199 places and 132 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.66

first choices for every place available

132 first preferences for 199 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Parkside School

There is no published appeal success rate for Parkside 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

Parkside School turned first-choice families away in 5 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 Parkside 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 0.86 per place 153 first choices 177 places 2016/17 0.98 per place 175 first choices 178 places 2017/18 0.78 per place 155 first choices 199 places 2018/19 0.94 per place 193 first choices 205 places 2019/20 1.02 per place 209 first choices 205 places 2020/21 1.19 per place 246 first choices 206 places 2021/22 1.21 per place 241 first choices 200 places 2022/23 1.02 per place 210 first choices 205 places 2023/24 0.91 per place 194 first choices 213 places 2024/25 0.84 per place 170 first choices 202 places 2025/26 1.04 per place 202 first choices 194 places 2026/27 0.66 per place 132 first choices 199 places
First preferences per place at Parkside School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 132 first preferences for 199 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Parkside School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 177 153 151 0.86
2016/17 178 175 159 0.98
2017/18 199 155 155 0.78
2018/19 205 193 186 0.94
2019/20 205 209 177 1.02
2020/21 206 246 191 1.19
2021/22 200 241 182 1.21
2022/23 205 210 192 1.02
2023/24 213 194 193 0.91
2024/25 202 170 170 0.84
2025/26 194 202 168 1.04
2026/27 199 132 132 0.66

Places offered

199

in 2026/27

Named first choice

132

406 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

132 of 132

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 193 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 132217.

How close you had to live

Parkside School filled its places in 2025, and 3,644m — 2.26 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

2.26 mi

3,644 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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Parkside School published for 2026 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for Parkside School, 2026 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Looked after children or children who were previously looked after, but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangements, or special guardianship order, including those who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be state care as a result of being adopted. (See note 1).
2 Children who have exceptional social or medical needs, supported by a written recommendation from the child’s paediatrician/consultant or professional from Children’s Services. The letter must explain why the school is the only suitable school to meet the child’s needs and why no other school could provide the appropriate support.
3 Children whose home address is in the school’s priority admission area* who have an older brother or sister attending from the same address, who are at present in years 7 – 10 and who will still be attending the school at the time of admission (in area siblings).
4 Other children whose home address is in the school’s priority admission area*.
5 Children whose home address is outside the school’s priority admission area* who have an older brother or sister attending from the same address, who are at present in years 7 – 10 and who will still be attending the school at the time of admission (out of area siblings).
6 Other children who live outside the school’s priority admission area*. * The school has more than one priority admission area, criteria 3 and 4 above will apply for the whole of the priority area 1 and then for the whole of priority area 2; if there are remaining unallocated places criterion 5 will then be considered before criterion 6. MULTIPLE BIRTHS Where a family of multiple births (twins, triplets etc) request admission and only one of the siblings can be offered a place, the remaining siblings will also be offered places above the admission number.
T. 01535 272 752 E. mail@parksideschool.net Discover how we make a difference at www.parksideschool.net PUPILS WITH AN EDUCATION, HEALTH AND CARE PLAN The admission of pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan is dealt with by a separate procedure. Such children will be admitted to the named school without reference to the oversubscription criteria.

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2026 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

Parkside School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

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

1,025

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,021

99.6% of capacity

Unfilled places

4

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

145

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 Parkside 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 Parkside School reported 4 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.6% 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 Parkside School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,039 places 1,067 on roll 2010/11 1,039 places 1,057 on roll 2011/12 1,039 places 1,052 on roll 2012/13 1,039 places 1,019 on roll 2013/14 1,039 places 995 on roll 2014/15 1,024 places 998 on roll 2015/16 1,024 places 982 on roll 2016/17 1,024 places 971 on roll 2017/18 1,151 places 1,001 on roll 2018/19 1,170 places 1,022 on roll 2020/21 1,170 places 1,111 on roll 2021/22 1,170 places 1,160 on roll 2022/23 1,195 places 1,168 on roll 2023/24 1,195 places 1,140 on roll 2024/25 1,170 places 1,102 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 BD13 5AD. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 150001).

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.