Refused a place at Star Radcliffe Academy?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 2 families who named Star Radcliffe Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 134 put it first and 132 of them were offered one.
Below: what an appeal in Bury actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 2 years of official figures.
first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27
134 first preferences for 148 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Star Radcliffe Academy
There is no published appeal success rate for Star Radcliffe 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 Bury 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 Bury, 27.6% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 118 of 427 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 Bury.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not Bury 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
Star Radcliffe Academy turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 2 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
Only 2 years of published figures exist for this school, so there is nothing to plot yet. The figures themselves are below.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025/26 | 149 | 184 | 144 | 1.23 |
| 2026/27 | 148 | 134 | 132 | 0.91 |
Places offered
148
in 2026/27
Named first choice
134
244 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
98.5%
132 of 134
Offers to families outside the council
1%
2 of 148 offers
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
750
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
145
19.3% of capacity
Unfilled places
605
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 Star Radcliffe 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 Star Radcliffe Academy reported 605 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 19.3% 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.
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. Bury does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — 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
- Free schools
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Bury
Postcode M26 2SZ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 150715).
Other contested secondary schools in Bury
- The Elton High School 1.32 first choices per place
- Woodhey High School 1.22 first choices per place
- Parrenthorn High School 1.10 first choices per place
- Manchester Mesivta School 1.05 first choices per place
- Unsworth Academy 0.96 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.