School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Finham Park School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 42 families who named Finham Park School as their first choice did not get a place: 257 put it first and 215 of them were offered one.

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

42

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

257 first preferences for 270 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Finham Park School

There is no published appeal success rate for Finham Park 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

Finham Park School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 11 of those years. In the other 1 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.

First preferences per place at Finham Park 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 1.25 per place 299 first choices 239 places 2016/17 1.27 per place 304 first choices 240 places 2017/18 1.27 per place 304 first choices 240 places 2018/19 1.19 per place 285 first choices 240 places 2019/20 1.15 per place 275 first choices 240 places 2020/21 1 per place 241 first choices 240 places 2021/22 1.13 per place 305 first choices 269 places 2022/23 1.09 per place 325 first choices 299 places 2023/24 1.13 per place 304 first choices 268 places 2024/25 1.21 per place 328 first choices 270 places 2025/26 1.03 per place 278 first choices 270 places 2026/27 0.95 per place 257 first choices 270 places
First preferences per place at Finham Park School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 257 first preferences for 270 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Finham Park School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 239 299 222 1.25
2016/17 240 304 226 1.27
2017/18 240 304 227 1.27
2018/19 240 285 229 1.19
2019/20 240 275 216 1.15
2020/21 240 241 205 1
2021/22 269 305 232 1.13
2022/23 299 325 270 1.09
2023/24 268 304 236 1.13
2024/25 270 328 252 1.21
2025/26 270 278 238 1.03
2026/27 270 257 215 0.95

Places offered

270

in 2026/27

Named first choice

257

588 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

83.7%

215 of 257

Offers to families outside the council

1%

2 of 270 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Finham Park 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 Finham Park 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 Students who, at the time of admission, are in care of a local authority or are provided with accommodation by the authority (looked after children). Also children who were previously looked after but ceased to be so because they were adopted, or became subject to a residence order or a special guardianship order. A looked-after child is defined in Section 22 of the Children Act 1989.
2 Students who live in or outside of the catchment area served by the school, who have a brother or sister attending the school in Years 7-10 provided that the brother or sister will continue to attend Finham Park the following academic year.
3 Other students who live in the catchment area served by the school.
4 Students by reference by distance to the school. If it is not possible to meet all of the requests in any one of the categories described above the school will prioritise the requests by reference to distance. Responding to offers All students must respond to offers by the deadline set on the offer letter. Failure to do so may mean that the offer is withdrawn and a place can be offered to another student. If oversubscription criteria have been applied and a student does not achieve the necessary entry requirements for a particular pathway, they must instead accept a place on an alternative pathway or the offer may be withdrawn.

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.

Finham Park 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

1,350

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,343

99.5% of capacity

Unfilled places

7

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

356

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 Finham Park 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 Finham Park School reported 7 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.5% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Finham Park School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 900 1,800 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,484 places 1,507 on roll 2012/13 1,484 places 1,516 on roll 2013/14 1,484 places 1,506 on roll 2014/15 1,484 places 1,501 on roll 2015/16 1,484 places 1,511 on roll 2016/17 1,484 places 1,525 on roll 2017/18 1,492 places 1,482 on roll 2018/19 1,492 places 1,514 on roll 2020/21 1,492 places 1,527 on roll 2021/22 1,492 places 1,542 on roll 2022/23 1,645 places 1,645 on roll 2023/24 1,645 places 1,718 on roll 2024/25 1,706 places 1,698 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 CV3 6EA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136963).

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.