Refused a place at Trinity Academy Bradford?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 65 families who named Trinity Academy Bradford as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 201 and 251 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Bradford actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 6 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
251 first preferences for 201 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Trinity Academy Bradford
There is no published appeal success rate for Trinity Academy Bradford, 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
Trinity Academy Bradford turned first-choice families away in 3 of the last 6 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021/22 | 180 | 80 | 80 | 0.44 |
| 2022/23 | 195 | 161 | 161 | 0.83 |
| 2023/24 | 186 | 165 | 154 | 0.89 |
| 2024/25 | 192 | 207 | 168 | 1.08 |
| 2025/26 | 166 | 262 | 155 | 1.58 |
| 2026/27 | 201 | 251 | 186 | 1.25 |
Places offered
201
in 2026/27
Named first choice
251
531 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
74.1%
186 of 251
Offers to families outside the council
6%
13 of 201 offers
How close you had to live
Every applicant was offered a place at Trinity Academy Bradford in 2025. That is the most recent round Bradford has published, and it means there was no cut-off that year — nobody was turned away for living too far, so no distance exists to be measured against.
Last place offered at
No cut-off
everyone who applied was offered, 2025
This is not a line you passed or failed
A panel cannot refuse your appeal because of how far from the school you live, and cannot allow it because you live close by. No cut-off applied here in any round Bradford has published — the school offered a place to everyone who asked for one. 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.
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 Trinity Academy Bradford published for 2025 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 | (a) Children who are in public care – ‘Looked After’ (as defined by section 22 of the Children Act 1989) or children who were previously looked after but ceased to be so because they became adopted or became subject to a child arrangements or special guardianship order. |
| (b) Children who appear (to the admission authority of the academy) to have been in public care outside of England and ceased to be in public care as a result of being adopted.1 A child is regarded as having been in state care in a place outside of England if they were accommodated by a public authority, a religious organisation or any other provider of care whose sole purpose is to benefit society. | |
| 2 | Children whose siblings currently attend the academy and who will continue to do so on the date of admission. (“Sibling” is defined as a full or half brother or sister; a stepbrother or sister; an adoptive brother or sister; the children of parents living together in the same family household. The elder sibling must still be on roll at the academy when the younger child starts at the academy i.e. sibling applications will only be accepted for siblings of students in years 7 to 10. |
| 3 | Children who attend named feeder schools - Foxhill Primary School, Keelham Primary School, Russell Hall Primary School, Shibden Head Primary Academy and Stocks Lane Primary School. |
| 4 | Children of staff employed at the academy. • Note – Staff, for this purpose, are defined as anyone employed by the academy who has held a permanent contract with the academy for at least two years prior to the application or to staff recently appointed to a post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. |
| 5 | Other children. Distance from the academy If there is oversubscription in any category, pupils will be admitted in order of proximity to TAB. Distances will be calculated using the Local Authority’s GIS system (Geographical Information System). To ensure consistency applies, all measurements will be carried out by the Local Authority’s GIS system and no other method of measuring distance will be considered. This is the point from which distance measurements will be taken. In the event of two or more children living equidistant from the academy, as measured by the procedure above, then the decision on which child will be allocated will be made using random allocation. |
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 2025 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.
Trinity Academy Bradford's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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
990
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
907
91.6% of capacity
Unfilled places
83
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 Trinity Academy Bradford 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 Trinity Academy Bradford reported 83 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 91.6% 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, 2020/21 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
This school's admission rules have been challenged
Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Trinity Academy Bradford has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 2 September 2022 | Arrangements did not comply | ADA3952 |
This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.
When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →
Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.
What these figures do not tell you
- Whether places will be as open this year. Bradford published that this school offered a place to everyone who applied, so no cut-off distance exists to quote. That was those rounds, not this one — demand moves year to year — 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 sponsor led
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Bradford
Postcode BD13 2AS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 148545).
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.