School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Cleeve School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 26 families who named Cleeve School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 304 and 312 put it first.

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

1.03

first choices for every place available

312 first preferences for 304 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Cleeve School

There is no published appeal success rate for Cleeve 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

Cleeve School turned first-choice families away in 3 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 Cleeve 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 0.85 per place 208 first choices 245 places 2016/17 0.97 per place 233 first choices 239 places 2017/18 0.88 per place 213 first choices 242 places 2018/19 0.73 per place 185 first choices 253 places 2019/20 0.71 per place 213 first choices 300 places 2020/21 0.72 per place 218 first choices 302 places 2021/22 0.72 per place 219 first choices 304 places 2022/23 0.9 per place 262 first choices 291 places 2023/24 1.01 per place 306 first choices 303 places 2024/25 0.9 per place 274 first choices 305 places 2025/26 1.08 per place 332 first choices 306 places 2026/27 1.03 per place 312 first choices 304 places
First preferences per place at Cleeve School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 312 first preferences for 304 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Cleeve School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 245 208 202 0.85
2016/17 239 233 214 0.97
2017/18 242 213 213 0.88
2018/19 253 185 185 0.73
2019/20 300 213 213 0.71
2020/21 302 218 218 0.72
2021/22 304 219 219 0.72
2022/23 291 262 262 0.9
2023/24 303 306 277 1.01
2024/25 305 274 265 0.9
2025/26 306 332 286 1.08
2026/27 304 312 286 1.03

Places offered

304

in 2026/27

Named first choice

312

591 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

91.7%

286 of 312

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 304 offers

How close you had to live

Cleeve School filled its places in 2025, and 9,897m — 6.15 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the catchment criterion.

Last place offered at

6.15 mi

9,897 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Catchment

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 Cleeve 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 Cleeve 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 Highest priority will be given to looked after children, all previously looked after children and later subject to an adoption residence, or special guardianship order including those who appear to the admission authority to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted who apply for a place at the school.
2 Priority will next be given to children of full or part time salaried members of staff who have been employed by Cleeve School for two years or more at the time of the application for admission or who have been employed to fill a vacant post where there is a demonstrable skills shortage.
3 Priority will next be given to children who have a sibling attending the school where the sibling is a member of years 7, 8, 9, 10 or 11 at the time of application and who will continue to be on the school roll when the applicant child is admitted. This criterion does not apply if a sibling has only attended years 12 and 13. A sibling is defined in section 3 above. 4. Priority will next be given to children living in the priority catchment area served by the school, with the strongest geographical distance. […] 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 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.

Cleeve 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

1,600

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,501

93.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

99

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

400

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 Cleeve 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 Cleeve School reported 99 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 93.8% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Cleeve School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,000 2,000 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,575 places 1,577 on roll 2012/13 1,575 places 1,546 on roll 2013/14 1,575 places 1,550 on roll 2014/15 1,575 places 1,531 on roll 2015/16 1,575 places 1,493 on roll 2016/17 1,575 places 1,507 on roll 2017/18 1,725 places 1,444 on roll 2018/19 1,725 places 1,447 on roll 2020/21 1,900 places 1,530 on roll 2021/22 2,000 places 1,562 on roll 2022/23 2,000 places 1,665 on roll 2023/24 2,000 places 1,769 on roll 2024/25 2,000 places 1,829 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 GL52 8AE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136772).

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.