School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at West Coventry Academy?

In 2026/27, West Coventry Academy offered 240 places and 227 families named it as their first choice.

Below: what an appeal in Coventry actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 11 years of official figures.

0.95

first choices for every place available

227 first preferences for 240 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at West Coventry Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for West Coventry 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 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

West Coventry Academy turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 11 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at West Coventry Academy, 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 18/19 20/21 22/23 24/25 26/27 2015/16 0.8 per place 106 first choices 133 places 2016/17 0.84 per place 79 first choices 94 places 2018/19 0.67 per place 107 first choices 160 places 2019/20 0.74 per place 145 first choices 197 places 2020/21 0.77 per place 160 first choices 207 places 2021/22 0.7 per place 126 first choices 179 places 2022/23 0.82 per place 172 first choices 210 places 2023/24 0.79 per place 138 first choices 175 places 2024/25 0.88 per place 184 first choices 209 places 2025/26 1.02 per place 244 first choices 240 places 2026/27 0.95 per place 227 first choices 240 places
First preferences per place at West Coventry Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 227 first preferences for 240 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at West Coventry Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 133 106 106 0.8
2016/17 94 79 79 0.84
2018/19 160 107 107 0.67
2019/20 197 145 142 0.74
2020/21 207 160 160 0.77
2021/22 179 126 124 0.7
2022/23 210 172 172 0.82
2023/24 175 138 134 0.79
2024/25 209 184 184 0.88
2025/26 240 244 229 1.02
2026/27 240 227 227 0.95

Places offered

240

in 2026/27

Named first choice

227

460 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

227 of 227

Offers to families outside the council

2%

4 of 240 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,150

95.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

50

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

166

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 West Coventry 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 West Coventry Academy reported 50 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 95.8% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at West Coventry Academy from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,356 places 1,274 on roll 2012/13 1,356 places 1,112 on roll 2013/14 1,356 places 1,056 on roll 2014/15 1,356 places 988 on roll 2015/16 1,356 places 902 on roll 2016/17 856 places 851 on roll 2017/18 1,385 places 1,196 on roll 2018/19 1,385 places 1,154 on roll 2020/21 1,385 places 1,113 on roll 2021/22 1,385 places 1,114 on roll 2022/23 1,385 places 1,212 on roll 2023/24 1,385 places 1,269 on roll 2024/25 1,366 places 1,314 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 CV4 9PW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137209).

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.