School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Anthony Gell School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 5 families who named Anthony Gell School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 131 and 135 put it first.

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

1.03

first choices for every place available

135 first preferences for 131 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Anthony Gell School

There is no published appeal success rate for Anthony Gell 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 Derbyshire 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 Derbyshire, 29.8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 185 of 620 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 Derbyshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Derbyshire 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

Anthony Gell School turned first-choice families away in 6 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 Anthony Gell 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 per place 93 first choices 93 places 2016/17 1 per place 106 first choices 106 places 2017/18 0.99 per place 119 first choices 120 places 2018/19 0.99 per place 134 first choices 135 places 2019/20 1.08 per place 144 first choices 133 places 2020/21 1.03 per place 135 first choices 131 places 2021/22 1.08 per place 141 first choices 131 places 2022/23 1.13 per place 143 first choices 126 places 2023/24 1.02 per place 133 first choices 131 places 2024/25 0.98 per place 107 first choices 109 places 2025/26 0.97 per place 104 first choices 107 places 2026/27 1.03 per place 135 first choices 131 places
First preferences per place at Anthony Gell School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 135 first preferences for 131 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Anthony Gell 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 93 93 93 1
2016/17 106 106 106 1
2017/18 120 119 119 0.99
2018/19 135 134 134 0.99
2019/20 133 144 132 1.08
2020/21 131 135 127 1.03
2021/22 131 141 130 1.08
2022/23 126 143 126 1.13
2023/24 131 133 130 1.02
2024/25 109 107 107 0.98
2025/26 107 104 104 0.97
2026/27 131 135 130 1.03

Places offered

131

in 2026/27

Named first choice

135

259 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

96.3%

130 of 135

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 131 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 112968.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Anthony Gell School published for 2025 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 Anthony Gell School, 2025 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 Looked after children and children who were looked after but ceased to be because they were adopted (or became subject to a residence order or special guardianship order).
2 Children living in the normal area served by the school at the time of application and admission who have brothers or sisters attending the school at the time of application and admission.
3 Children living in the normal area served by the school at the time of application and admission.
4 Children not living in the normal area served by the school but who have brothers or sisters attending the school at the time of application and admission.
5 Other children whose parents have requested a place. When in the case of 2, 3, 4, or 5 above, choices have to be made between children satisfying the same criteria, those children living nearest to the school will be given preference.

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 2025 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.

Anthony Gell School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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

660

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

645

97.7% of capacity

Unfilled places

15

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

137

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 Anthony Gell 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 Anthony Gell School reported 15 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 97.7% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Anthony Gell School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 778 places 654 on roll 2010/11 778 places 682 on roll 2011/12 778 places 691 on roll 2012/13 778 places 687 on roll 2013/14 778 places 673 on roll 2014/15 778 places 674 on roll 2015/16 778 places 659 on roll 2016/17 778 places 694 on roll 2017/18 797 places 731 on roll 2018/19 797 places 746 on roll 2020/21 797 places 824 on roll 2021/22 797 places 833 on roll 2022/23 797 places 852 on roll 2023/24 797 places 818 on roll 2024/25 797 places 782 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
Derbyshire

Postcode DE4 4DX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 149644).

Other contested secondary schools in Derbyshire

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.