School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Denmark Road High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 55 families who named Denmark Road High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 147 and 190 put it first.

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

1.29

first choices for every place available

190 first preferences for 147 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Denmark Road High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Denmark Road High 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

Denmark Road High School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 11 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 Denmark Road High 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 1.34 per place 160 first choices 119 places 2016/17 1.1 per place 141 first choices 128 places 2017/18 1.18 per place 176 first choices 149 places 2018/19 1.01 per place 152 first choices 150 places 2019/20 1.39 per place 205 first choices 148 places 2020/21 1.08 per place 162 first choices 150 places 2021/22 1.31 per place 191 first choices 146 places 2022/23 1.09 per place 161 first choices 148 places 2023/24 1 per place 144 first choices 144 places 2024/25 1.32 per place 190 first choices 144 places 2025/26 1.5 per place 222 first choices 148 places 2026/27 1.29 per place 190 first choices 147 places
First preferences per place at Denmark Road High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 190 first preferences for 147 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Denmark Road High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 119 160 112 1.34
2016/17 128 141 120 1.1
2017/18 149 176 148 1.18
2018/19 150 152 138 1.01
2019/20 148 205 139 1.39
2020/21 150 162 142 1.08
2021/22 146 191 77 1.31
2022/23 148 161 138 1.09
2023/24 144 144 129 1
2024/25 144 190 123 1.32
2025/26 148 222 135 1.5
2026/27 147 190 135 1.29

Places offered

147

in 2026/27

Named first choice

190

511 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

71.1%

135 of 190

Offers to families outside the council

16%

23 of 147 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Denmark Road High 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 Denmark Road High 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 and previously looked after Students [a] [b].
2 Students who are registered for Pupil Premium [c].
3 Students scoring highest in the admissions criteria. In the event of a tie break between two or more students when applying the above criteria a process of random allocation will be followed by the Sixth Form Admissions’ Review Group, which will be supervised by someone independent of the School.

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.

Denmark Road High 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

750

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

775

103.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

25

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

240

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 Denmark Road High 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 Denmark Road High School was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Denmark Road High 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 2010/11 797 places 843 on roll 2011/12 797 places 876 on roll 2012/13 797 places 870 on roll 2013/14 797 places 846 on roll 2014/15 797 places 817 on roll 2015/16 797 places 783 on roll 2016/17 797 places 816 on roll 2017/18 947 places 883 on roll 2018/19 797 places 895 on roll 2020/21 990 places 986 on roll 2021/22 990 places 1,013 on roll 2022/23 990 places 989 on roll 2023/24 990 places 981 on roll 2024/25 990 places 1,014 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
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Gloucestershire

Postcode GL1 3JN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136666).

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.