School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Katharine Lady Berkeley's School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 27 families who named Katharine Lady Berkeley's School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 261 and 284 put it first.

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

1.09

first choices for every place available

284 first preferences for 261 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Katharine Lady Berkeley's School

There is no published appeal success rate for Katharine Lady Berkeley's 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

Katharine Lady Berkeley's School turned first-choice families away in 9 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 Katharine Lady Berkeley's 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 0.98 per place 244 first choices 248 places 2016/17 1.09 per place 269 first choices 246 places 2017/18 1.06 per place 256 first choices 241 places 2018/19 1.3 per place 319 first choices 246 places 2019/20 1.26 per place 310 first choices 246 places 2020/21 0.98 per place 235 first choices 239 places 2021/22 1.14 per place 277 first choices 244 places 2022/23 1.06 per place 257 first choices 243 places 2023/24 1.12 per place 277 first choices 248 places 2024/25 1.02 per place 246 first choices 242 places 2025/26 0.99 per place 257 first choices 260 places 2026/27 1.09 per place 284 first choices 261 places
First preferences per place at Katharine Lady Berkeley's School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 284 first preferences for 261 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Katharine Lady Berkeley's School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 248 244 239 0.98
2016/17 246 269 243 1.09
2017/18 241 256 241 1.06
2018/19 246 319 246 1.3
2019/20 246 310 242 1.26
2020/21 239 235 228 0.98
2021/22 244 277 234 1.14
2022/23 243 257 242 1.06
2023/24 248 277 246 1.12
2024/25 242 246 236 1.02
2025/26 260 257 252 0.99
2026/27 261 284 257 1.09

Places offered

261

in 2026/27

Named first choice

284

480 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

90.5%

257 of 284

Offers to families outside the council

37%

97 of 261 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Katharine Lady Berkeley's 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 Katharine Lady Berkeley's 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 Children in Public Care (Looked After Children(2), previously Looked After Children and Internationally Adopted Previously Looked After Children. Previously Looked After Children (PLAC) are children who were looked after but ceased to be so because they were adopted(3) or became subject to a Child Arrangement Order(4) or Special Guardianship Order). Internationally Adopted Previously Looked After Children (IAPLAC) are children 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.
2 Students who have attended this school as Year 11 students.
3 Students who have a sibling(5) who will be registered at the school on the first day of the term in September when the applicant would start in Year 12.
4 Children of members of staff employed(7) by the school in either or both of the following circumstances:
a) where the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, and/or
b) the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage.
5 Students living in the parishes(8) of Wotton-under-Edge, North Nibley, Ozleworth, Kingscote, Alderley, Hillesley and Tresham, Hawkesbury, Kingswood, Wickwar, Charfield, Cromhall, Tortworth, Falfield, Stinchcombe, Alkington, Ham and Stone, Berkeley, Hinton and Hamfallow.
6 Applications which do not fall into the above criteria will be selected according to the proximity (9) of the student’s home address to the school. Where the number of applications exceeds the school’s capacity, students who are not offered places initially will have the opportunity to place their application on a waiting list. The waiting list will be maintained for at least one term in the academic year of admission, i.e. until 31 December in Year 12 following an application for admission at the start of September. If a place in the year group becomes vacant, students on the waiting list will be offered places in the order defined by the above over-subscription criteria. […] 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.

Katharine Lady Berkeley's 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

1,250

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,247

99.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

3

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

300

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 Katharine Lady Berkeley's 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 Katharine Lady Berkeley's School reported 3 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.8% 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 Katharine Lady Berkeley's School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,495 places 1,504 on roll 2012/13 1,495 places 1,500 on roll 2013/14 1,495 places 1,445 on roll 2014/15 1,495 places 1,451 on roll 2015/16 1,495 places 1,466 on roll 2016/17 1,495 places 1,508 on roll 2017/18 1,495 places 1,495 on roll 2018/19 1,495 places 1,465 on roll 2020/21 1,550 places 1,520 on roll 2021/22 1,550 places 1,530 on roll 2022/23 1,550 places 1,524 on roll 2023/24 1,550 places 1,513 on roll 2024/25 1,550 places 1,508 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 GL12 8RB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137033).

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.