Refused a place at Derby Cathedral School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 18 families who named Derby Cathedral School as their first choice did not get a place: 158 put it first and 140 of them were offered one.
Below: what an appeal in Derby actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 8 years of official figures.
first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27
158 first preferences for 176 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Derby Cathedral School
There is no published appeal success rate for Derby Cathedral 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 Derby 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 Derby, 17.8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 159 of 892 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 Derby.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not Derby 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
Derby Cathedral School turned first-choice families away in 7 of the last 8 years. More families named it first than it had places in 1 of those years. In the other 6 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019/20 | 160 | 122 | 115 | 0.76 |
| 2020/21 | 179 | 175 | 124 | 0.98 |
| 2021/22 | 179 | 140 | 113 | 0.78 |
| 2022/23 | 177 | 183 | 155 | 1.03 |
| 2023/24 | 177 | 169 | 143 | 0.95 |
| 2024/25 | 179 | 174 | 147 | 0.97 |
| 2025/26 | 180 | 173 | 142 | 0.96 |
| 2026/27 | 176 | 158 | 140 | 0.9 |
Places offered
176
in 2026/27
Named first choice
158
431 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
88.6%
140 of 158
Offers to families outside the council
0%
0 of 176 offers
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria Derby Cathedral School published for 2026 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 | Looked After Children (LAC) and previously LAC, including those who have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted or became subject to a child arrangement order or special guardianship order. IAPLAC - Internationally Adopted Previously Looked After Children. For children who were in state care outside of England and were then adopted, you must submit evidence with your application so this priority can be verified. The evidence must show your child's adoption (an adoption order or adoption birth certificate); and - that they were in state care outside England (a letter from the state) (a). |
| 2 | Priority will next be given to children based on their exceptional medical or social needs(b). Each application must include evidence, from a medical specialist or social worker of the child’s need and why they must attend this school rather than any other, based on those needs. If evidence is not submitted to the local authority with the application, a child’s medical or social needs cannot be considered. |
| 3 | Children eligible for the pupil premium. Evidence of eligibility will need to be submitted with the application(c). |
| 4 | Priority will next be given to the children of staff(d) |
| 5 | Siblings of pupils attending the school at the time the application is received. Sibling means a natural brother or sister, a half brother or sister, a legally adopted brother or sister or half brother or sister, a stepbrother or sister, or other child living in the same household who, in any of these cases, will be living with them at the same address at the date of their entry to the school. |
| 6 | Anyone else requesting a place. All pupils who have named the school in their EHC plan will be admitted. |
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 2026 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.
Derby Cathedral School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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
900
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
890
98.9% of capacity
Unfilled places
10
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
360
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 Derby Cathedral 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 Derby Cathedral School reported 10 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.9% 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, 2018/19 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
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. Derby 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
- Faith
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Derby
Postcode DE1 1LR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 143734).
Other contested secondary schools in Derby
- Landau Forte College 2.87 first choices per place
- Littleover Community School 1.29 first choices per place
- West Park School 1.06 first choices per place
- Chellaston Academy 1.05 first choices per place
- Saint Benedict, A Catholic Voluntary Academy 0.83 first choices per place
- Derby Moor Spencer Academy 0.81 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.