School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Dene Magna and Sixth Form?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 12 families who named Dene Magna and Sixth Form as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 165 and 176 put it first.

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

1.07

first choices for every place available

176 first preferences for 165 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Dene Magna and Sixth Form

There is no published appeal success rate for Dene Magna and Sixth Form, 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

Dene Magna and Sixth Form 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.

First preferences per place at Dene Magna and Sixth Form, 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 1.07 per place 176 first choices 165 places 2016/17 1.36 per place 231 first choices 170 places 2017/18 1.27 per place 214 first choices 168 places 2018/19 1.19 per place 203 first choices 171 places 2019/20 1.16 per place 196 first choices 169 places 2020/21 1.24 per place 216 first choices 174 places 2021/22 1.26 per place 206 first choices 164 places 2022/23 1.33 per place 228 first choices 171 places 2023/24 1.2 per place 197 first choices 164 places 2024/25 1.11 per place 188 first choices 170 places 2025/26 1.12 per place 185 first choices 165 places 2026/27 1.07 per place 176 first choices 165 places
First preferences per place at Dene Magna and Sixth Form. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 176 first preferences for 165 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Dene Magna and Sixth Form, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 165 176 160 1.07
2016/17 170 231 168 1.36
2017/18 168 214 166 1.27
2018/19 171 203 169 1.19
2019/20 169 196 165 1.16
2020/21 174 216 172 1.24
2021/22 164 206 159 1.26
2022/23 171 228 169 1.33
2023/24 164 197 162 1.2
2024/25 170 188 168 1.11
2025/26 165 185 163 1.12
2026/27 165 176 164 1.07

Places offered

165

in 2026/27

Named first choice

176

271 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

93.2%

164 of 176

Offers to families outside the council

5%

9 of 165 offers

How close you had to live

Dene Magna and Sixth Form filled its places in 2025, and 5,649m — 3.51 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

3.51 mi

5,649 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.

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

875

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

855

97.7% of capacity

Unfilled places

20

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

250

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 Dene Magna and Sixth Form 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 Dene Magna and Sixth Form reported 20 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Dene Magna and Sixth Form from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 725 places 740 on roll 2012/13 725 places 745 on roll 2013/14 725 places 726 on roll 2014/15 750 places 759 on roll 2015/16 750 places 777 on roll 2016/17 750 places 798 on roll 2017/18 875 places 821 on roll 2018/19 875 places 851 on roll 2020/21 1,125 places 1,003 on roll 2021/22 1,125 places 1,026 on roll 2022/23 1,125 places 1,028 on roll 2023/24 1,125 places 1,008 on roll 2024/25 1,125 places 1,004 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 GL17 0DU. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137387).

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.