School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Cirencester Deer Park School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 9 families who named Cirencester Deer Park School as their first choice did not get a place: 186 put it first and 177 of them were offered one.

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

9

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

186 first preferences for 204 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Cirencester Deer Park School

There is no published appeal success rate for Cirencester Deer Park 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.

How contested this school has been

Cirencester Deer Park School turned first-choice families away in 2 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 1 of those years. In the other 1 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.

First preferences per place at Cirencester Deer Park 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 0.86 per place 159 first choices 184 places 2016/17 0.88 per place 156 first choices 177 places 2017/18 0.89 per place 165 first choices 185 places 2018/19 0.88 per place 184 first choices 208 places 2019/20 0.9 per place 184 first choices 205 places 2020/21 0.92 per place 187 first choices 203 places 2021/22 0.87 per place 180 first choices 207 places 2022/23 1.07 per place 220 first choices 205 places 2023/24 0.97 per place 201 first choices 208 places 2024/25 0.97 per place 194 first choices 200 places 2025/26 0.92 per place 186 first choices 203 places 2026/27 0.91 per place 186 first choices 204 places
First preferences per place at Cirencester Deer Park School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 186 first preferences for 204 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Cirencester Deer Park School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 184 159 159 0.86
2016/17 177 156 156 0.88
2017/18 185 165 165 0.89
2018/19 208 184 183 0.88
2019/20 205 184 184 0.9
2020/21 203 187 185 0.92
2021/22 207 180 167 0.87
2022/23 205 220 193 1.07
2023/24 208 201 193 0.97
2024/25 200 194 173 0.97
2025/26 203 186 172 0.92
2026/27 204 186 177 0.91

Places offered

204

in 2026/27

Named first choice

186

470 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

95.2%

177 of 186

Offers to families outside the council

4%

9 of 204 offers

How close you had to live

Cirencester Deer Park School filled its places in 2025, and 16,705m — 10.38 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the distance criterion.

Last place offered at

10.38 mi

16,705 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

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 Cirencester Deer Park 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Cirencester Deer Park School, 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 ‘Looked After Children’ (a) or children who were previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption (b) child arrangements order (c) or special guardianship order (d) or a child who has previously been in state care outside of England (IAPLAC) (e).
(a) A ‘looked after child’ is a child who is (i) in the care of a local authority, or (ii) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in Section 22(1) of the Children Act 1989) at the time of making an application to a school. In Gloucestershire, such children are referred to as Children in Care.
(b) This includes children who were adopted under the Adoption Act 1976 (see section 12 adoption orders) and children who were adopted under the Adoption and Childrens Act 2002 (see section 46 adoption orders).
(c) Under the provisions of s.12 of the Children and Families Act 2014, which amend section 8 of the Children Act 1989, residence orders have now been replaced by child arrangement orders.
(d) See Section 14A of the Children Act 1989 which defines a ‘special guardianship order’ as an order appointing one or more individuals to be a child’s special guardian (or special guardians).
(e) A child is regarded as having been ‘in state care outside of England’ if they were in the care of or were accommodated by a public authority, a religious organisation, or any other provider of care whose sole or main purpose is to benefit society (see Section 23ZZA (8) of the Children Act 1989 (inserted by Section 4 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017)). 2. Children living in the existing catchment area of the school which includes the town of Cirencester (excluding the estates bounded by London Road and the town by- pass) and the parishes of Coates and Sapperton to the west, and parishes of Siddington, Kemble, Poole Keynes, Somerford Keynes to the south. […] criterion continues in the source document
2 Children who have siblings attending the school and who will continue to do so at the time of their admission. We use the Local Authority’s standard definition of ‘sibling’: ‘a brother or sister, half brother or sister, adopted brother or sister, step brother or sister, or the child of the parent/carer’s partner as well as children who are brought together as a family by a same sex civil partnership. In every case, the child must be living in the same family unit at the same address, at the time of application.’
3 Other children: proximity of the child’s home to the school, with those living nearer being accorded priority. In the event of oversubscription in any of the above criterion, places will be allocated to children 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 Reception at the School, using the Local Authority’s computerised measuring system, with those living closer to the school receiving the higher priority. […] criterion continues in the source document

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.

Cirencester Deer Park 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

1,045

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,013

96.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

32

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

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 Cirencester Deer Park 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 Cirencester Deer Park School reported 32 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 96.9% 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

Places and pupils on roll at Cirencester Deer Park School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,045 places 1,027 on roll 2011/12 1,045 places 1,000 on roll 2012/13 1,045 places 995 on roll 2013/14 1,045 places 969 on roll 2014/15 1,045 places 970 on roll 2015/16 1,045 places 963 on roll 2016/17 1,045 places 957 on roll 2017/18 1,045 places 911 on roll 2018/19 1,045 places 934 on roll 2020/21 1,045 places 952 on roll 2021/22 1,045 places 985 on roll 2022/23 1,045 places 1,010 on roll 2023/24 1,045 places 1,007 on roll 2024/25 1,045 places 1,013 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
Gloucestershire

Postcode GL7 1XB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136527).

Other contested secondary schools in Gloucestershire

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.