School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Barr's Hill School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 71 families who named Barr's Hill School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 180 and 223 put it first.

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

1.24

first choices for every place available

223 first preferences for 180 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Barr's Hill School

There is no published appeal success rate for Barr's Hill 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 Coventry 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 Coventry, 21.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 224 of 1,056 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 Coventry.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Coventry 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

Barr's Hill School turned first-choice families away in 4 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 Barr's Hill 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 0.41 per place 47 first choices 115 places 2016/17 0.49 per place 58 first choices 119 places 2017/18 0.41 per place 53 first choices 130 places 2018/19 0.43 per place 56 first choices 131 places 2019/20 0.74 per place 97 first choices 131 places 2020/21 0.71 per place 115 first choices 161 places 2021/22 0.74 per place 133 first choices 180 places 2022/23 0.83 per place 149 first choices 179 places 2023/24 1.12 per place 201 first choices 180 places 2024/25 1.05 per place 188 first choices 179 places 2025/26 1.29 per place 232 first choices 180 places 2026/27 1.24 per place 223 first choices 180 places
First preferences per place at Barr's Hill School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 223 first preferences for 180 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Barr's Hill School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 115 47 47 0.41
2016/17 119 58 58 0.49
2017/18 130 53 53 0.41
2018/19 131 56 56 0.43
2019/20 131 97 94 0.74
2020/21 161 115 112 0.71
2021/22 180 133 125 0.74
2022/23 179 149 135 0.83
2023/24 180 201 152 1.12
2024/25 179 188 143 1.05
2025/26 180 232 157 1.29
2026/27 180 223 152 1.24

Places offered

180

in 2026/27

Named first choice

223

691 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

68.2%

152 of 223

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 180 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 103727.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Barr's Hill School published for 2027 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 Barr's Hill School, 2027 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 Children who, at the time of admission, are in the care of a local authority or are provided with accommodation by the authority (looked after children) and all who were previously looked after but ceased to be so because they were adopted, or became subject to a child arrangements order or a special guardianship order, including those children who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted. A looked after child is defined in Sections 22 of the Children Act 1989 (see Definitions section) A looked-after child is defined in Section 22 of the Children Act 1989
2 Children who live in the catchment area served by the school, who have a brother or sister attending the school provided that the brother or sister will continue to attend that school the following year The definition of brother or sister includes stepbrothers, stepsisters, half-brothers, half- sisters and adopted brothers and sisters living at the same permanent address
3 Other children who live in the catchment area served by the school
4 Children living outside the catchment area with a brother or sister who currently attends the school, provided that the brother or sister will continue to attend that school the following year
5 Children by reference to the distance to the school If it is not possible to meet all of the requests in any one of the categories described above, the Academy will prioritise the requests by reference to distance

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 2027 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.

Barr's Hill School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

814

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

880

108.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

66

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

150

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 Barr's Hill 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 Barr's Hill 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Barr's Hill School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 875 places 744 on roll 2010/11 778 places 705 on roll 2011/12 778 places 767 on roll 2012/13 778 places 770 on roll 2013/14 778 places 756 on roll 2014/15 778 places 740 on roll 2015/16 778 places 722 on roll 2016/17 778 places 731 on roll 2017/18 719 places 683 on roll 2018/19 719 places 690 on roll 2020/21 719 places 778 on roll 2021/22 964 places 844 on roll 2022/23 964 places 928 on roll 2023/24 964 places 996 on roll 2024/25 964 places 1,035 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
Coventry

Postcode CV1 4BU. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 142339).

Other contested secondary schools in Coventry

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.