Refused a place at Balcarras School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 64 families who named Balcarras School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 181 and 239 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Gloucestershire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
239 first preferences for 181 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Balcarras School
There is no published appeal success rate for Balcarras 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 Gloucestershire 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 Gloucestershire, 26.5% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 424 of 1,598 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 Gloucestershire.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not Gloucestershire 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
Balcarras School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 188 | 290 | 186 | 1.54 |
| 2016/17 | 189 | 261 | 183 | 1.38 |
| 2017/18 | 219 | 271 | 217 | 1.24 |
| 2018/19 | 190 | 269 | 189 | 1.42 |
| 2019/20 | 218 | 279 | 213 | 1.28 |
| 2020/21 | 187 | 263 | 183 | 1.41 |
| 2021/22 | 194 | 202 | 171 | 1.04 |
| 2022/23 | 188 | 240 | 183 | 1.28 |
| 2023/24 | 184 | 243 | 177 | 1.32 |
| 2024/25 | 190 | 231 | 186 | 1.22 |
| 2025/26 | 185 | 255 | 180 | 1.38 |
| 2026/27 | 181 | 239 | 175 | 1.32 |
Places offered
181
in 2026/27
Named first choice
239
776 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
73.2%
175 of 239
Offers to families outside the council
0%
0 of 181 offers
How close you had to live
Balcarras School filled its places in 2025, and 21,758m — 13.52 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the sibling criterion.
Last place offered at
13.52 mi
21,758 metres, 2025
Under criterion
Sibling
as the council described it
This is not a line you passed or failed
A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.
It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.
Gloucestershire Council, allocation statistics for 2025. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria Balcarras 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 | Highest priority will be given to looked-after children and all previously looked-after children who apply for a place at the school (see definition in section 3). |
| 2 | Priority will next be given to children living in the school’s area of priority (see Area of Priority Map in Appendix 1) who have a sibling attending the school where the sibling is or has been a member of Years 7-12 and who will continue to be on the school roll when the applicant’s child is admitted. This criterion does not apply if the sibling has only attended Years 12-13. |
| 3 | Priority will next be given to children of full or part time salaried members of staff who have been employed at Balcarras for two years or more at the time of the application for admission, or of a member of staff recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. This does not include staff employed on an ad-hoc or casual basis, e.g. examination invigilators, supply staff etc. |
| 4 | Priority will next be given to children living in the area of priority, served by the school (see Appendix 1). If there are more children in the area of priority than places available, those with the strongest geographical claim, measured in a straight line from the ordnance survey address point of the child's home address (including flats) to the ordnance survey address point of the school, using the Local Authority's computerised measuring system, with those living closer to the school receiving the higher priority. |
| 5 | Priority will next be given to children who live outside the area of priority (see Appendix 1), who have a sibling attending the school where the sibling is or has been a member of Years 7-12 and who will continue to be on the school roll when the applicant’s child is admitted. This criterion does not apply if the sibling has only attended Years 12-13. |
| 6 | Priority will next be given to children with the strongest geographical claim, measured in a straight line from the ordnance survey address point of the child's |
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.
Balcarras 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
980
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
969
98.9% of capacity
Unfilled places
11
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
361
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 Balcarras 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 Balcarras School reported 11 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
This school's admission rules have been challenged
Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Balcarras School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 9 June 2026 | Arrangements did not comply | ADA4620 |
This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.
When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →
Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.
What these figures do not tell you
- Whether this year's cut-off will be the same. The distance above is last year's and it moves with whoever applies — it is not a boundary you can be measured against in advance, and no council publishes next year's — 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
- Academy converter
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Gloucestershire
Postcode GL53 8QF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136474).
Other contested secondary schools in Gloucestershire
- Pate's Grammar School 1.46 first choices per place
- The High School Leckhampton 1.45 first choices per place
- Thomas Keble School 1.33 first choices per place
- Stroud High School 1.32 first choices per place
- Denmark Road High School 1.29 first choices per place
- Sir Thomas Rich's School 1.29 first choices per place
- St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre 1.29 first choices per place
- Churchdown School 1.23 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.