School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Belper School and Sixth Form Centre?

In 2026/27, Belper School and Sixth Form Centre offered 166 places and 164 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.99

first choices for every place available

164 first preferences for 166 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Belper School and Sixth Form Centre

There is no published appeal success rate for Belper School and Sixth Form Centre, 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

Belper School and Sixth Form Centre turned first-choice families away in 2 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 Belper School and Sixth Form Centre, 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 0.94 per place 188 first choices 200 places 2016/17 1 per place 193 first choices 193 places 2017/18 0.97 per place 199 first choices 206 places 2018/19 0.98 per place 203 first choices 207 places 2019/20 0.92 per place 193 first choices 209 places 2020/21 0.95 per place 194 first choices 204 places 2021/22 1.01 per place 208 first choices 206 places 2022/23 0.95 per place 193 first choices 204 places 2023/24 0.98 per place 202 first choices 206 places 2024/25 1.04 per place 210 first choices 202 places 2025/26 0.98 per place 186 first choices 190 places 2026/27 0.99 per place 164 first choices 166 places
First preferences per place at Belper School and Sixth Form Centre. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 164 first preferences for 166 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Belper School and Sixth Form Centre, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 200 188 188 0.94
2016/17 193 193 193 1
2017/18 206 199 198 0.97
2018/19 207 203 203 0.98
2019/20 209 193 193 0.92
2020/21 204 194 194 0.95
2021/22 206 208 201 1.01
2022/23 204 193 193 0.95
2023/24 206 202 202 0.98
2024/25 202 210 197 1.04
2025/26 190 186 186 0.98
2026/27 166 164 164 0.99

Places offered

166

in 2026/27

Named first choice

164

255 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

164 of 164

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 164 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Belper School and Sixth Form Centre 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Belper School and Sixth Form Centre, 2026 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 in Care (including those who are subsequently adopted and those who are subject to residence order or special guardianship order) who name Belper School & Sixth Form Centre as their choice
2 All other children who live in the normal area served by the school at the time of application and admission who have siblings attending the school at the time of application and admission
3 Children living in the normal area at the time of application and admission
4 Children not living in the normal area, but who have siblings at Belper School & Sixth Form Centre
5 Other children whose parents/carers have requested a place

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.

Belper School and Sixth Form Centre'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

1,458

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,039

71.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

419

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

134

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 Belper School and Sixth Form Centre 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 Belper School and Sixth Form Centre reported 419 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 71.3% 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 Belper School and Sixth Form Centre from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,402 places 1,464 on roll 2010/11 1,402 places 1,455 on roll 2011/12 1,402 places 1,466 on roll 2012/13 1,402 places 1,428 on roll 2013/14 1,402 places 1,360 on roll 2014/15 1,402 places 1,341 on roll 2015/16 1,402 places 1,305 on roll 2016/17 1,402 places 1,291 on roll 2017/18 1,402 places 1,200 on roll 2018/19 1,402 places 1,199 on roll 2020/21 1,402 places 1,209 on roll 2021/22 1,402 places 1,216 on roll 2022/23 1,402 places 1,169 on roll 2023/24 1,570 places 1,173 on roll 2024/25 1,592 places 1,184 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
Foundation school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Derbyshire

Postcode DE56 0DA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 112989).

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.