Refused a place at St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary Academy?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 50 families who named St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 283 and 297 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Bradford actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
297 first preferences for 283 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary Academy
There is no published appeal success rate for St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary 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.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary Academy turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 10 of those years. In the other 2 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 290 | 332 | 242 | 1.14 |
| 2016/17 | 290 | 351 | 258 | 1.21 |
| 2017/18 | 287 | 318 | 248 | 1.11 |
| 2018/19 | 284 | 329 | 238 | 1.16 |
| 2019/20 | 285 | 274 | 237 | 0.96 |
| 2020/21 | 288 | 284 | 250 | 0.99 |
| 2021/22 | 286 | 297 | 250 | 1.04 |
| 2022/23 | 286 | 302 | 256 | 1.06 |
| 2023/24 | 284 | 339 | 270 | 1.19 |
| 2024/25 | 285 | 336 | 257 | 1.18 |
| 2025/26 | 285 | 306 | 253 | 1.07 |
| 2026/27 | 283 | 297 | 247 | 1.05 |
Places offered
283
in 2026/27
Named first choice
297
665 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
83.2%
247 of 297
Offers to families outside the council
0%
1 of 283 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 140569.
How close you had to live
St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary Academy filled its places in 2025, and 1,265m — 0.79 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
0.79 mi
1,265 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 St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary Academy 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Catholic looked after and previously looked after children (see notes 2 & 3). |
| 2 | Catholic children with a sibling who attends St Bede’s and St Joseph’s Catholic College (see notes 3 and 6). |
| 3 | Catholic children who live in the primary school defined areas of St Anthony’s Catholic Primary, Clayton, St Anthony’s Catholic Primary, Shipley, Our Lady & St Brendan’s Catholic Primary, St Clare’s Catholic Primary, St Columba’s Catholic Primary, St Cuthbert’s Catholic Primary, St Francis Catholic Primary, St John the Evangelist Catholic Primary, St Joseph’s Catholic Primary, Bradford, St Joseph’s Catholic Primary, Bingley, St Matthew’s Catholic Primary, St Walburga’s Catholic Primary, Shipley, St William’s Catholic Primary, St Winefride’s Catholic Primary and go to the Catholic primary schools serving those areas (see notes 3 and 4). |
| 4 | Catholic children who live in the above-named defined areas (see notes 3 and 4). |
| 5 | Catholic children who currently attend one of the Catholic primary schools (listed in 3 above) but do not live in the defined area (see notes 3 and 4). |
| 6 | Other Catholic children (see note 3). |
| 7 | Other looked after and previously looked after children with a sibling who attends St Bede’s and St Joseph’s Catholic College (see notes 2 & 6). |
| 8 | Other looked after and previously looked after children (see note 2). |
| 9 | Members of an Eastern Christian Church (see note 5). |
| 10 | Other children with a sibling who attends St Bede’s and St Joseph’s Catholic College. (see |
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.
St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary Academy'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
1,500
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,452
96.8% of capacity
Unfilled places
48
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
450
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 St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary 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 St Bede's and St Joseph's Catholic College, A Voluntary Academy reported 48 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 96.8% 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, 2014/15 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- Whether this year's cut-off will be the same. The distance above is last year's and it moves with whoever applies — it is not a boundary you can be measured against in advance, and no council publishes next year's — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Academy converter
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- Faith
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Bradford
Postcode BD9 4BQ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 148520).
Other contested secondary schools in Bradford
- Dixons Kings Academy 2.28 first choices per place
- Dixons City Academy 2.16 first choices per place
- Eden Boys' Leadership Academy, Bradford 1.93 first choices per place
- Feversham Girls' Secondary Academy 1.55 first choices per place
- Beckfoot School 1.49 first choices per place
- Dixons Trinity Academy 1.40 first choices per place
- Carlton Keighley 1.35 first choices per place
- Carlton Bolling 1.27 first choices per place
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.