School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Marling School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 55 families who named Marling School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 149 and 164 put it first.

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

1.10

first choices for every place available

164 first preferences for 149 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Marling School

There is no published appeal success rate for Marling 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

Marling School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 10 of those years. In the other 2 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 Marling 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 1.29 per place 154 first choices 119 places 2016/17 1.46 per place 215 first choices 147 places 2017/18 1.13 per place 170 first choices 150 places 2018/19 1.4 per place 207 first choices 148 places 2019/20 1.22 per place 181 first choices 148 places 2020/21 1.04 per place 150 first choices 144 places 2021/22 1.44 per place 217 first choices 151 places 2022/23 1.05 per place 158 first choices 150 places 2023/24 0.98 per place 144 first choices 147 places 2024/25 1.31 per place 196 first choices 150 places 2025/26 0.99 per place 149 first choices 150 places 2026/27 1.1 per place 164 first choices 149 places
First preferences per place at Marling School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 164 first preferences for 149 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Marling School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 119 154 112 1.29
2016/17 147 215 143 1.46
2017/18 150 170 145 1.13
2018/19 148 207 135 1.4
2019/20 148 181 133 1.22
2020/21 144 150 133 1.04
2021/22 151 217 111 1.44
2022/23 150 158 121 1.05
2023/24 147 144 113 0.98
2024/25 150 196 98 1.31
2025/26 150 149 108 0.99
2026/27 149 164 109 1.1

Places offered

149

in 2026/27

Named first choice

164

431 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

66.5%

109 of 164

Offers to families outside the council

40%

59 of 149 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Marling 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 Marling 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 Any 'looked after child'8 or child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangements, 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.
2 Any candidate attracting Pupil Premium funding7 during their secondary school education.
3 Applicants with the highest average GCSE grade ‘score’ in their best eight separate full course subjects (see Section 3 above) In the event of a tie break between two or more applicants when applying the above criteria, a process of random allocation will be followed by the Governing Body, which will be supervised by someone independent of the school. There is a system of appeals against non-admission (Section 11).

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.

Marling 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

784

104.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

34

reported as full or beyond

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 Marling 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 Marling 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Marling School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 818 places 848 on roll 2012/13 818 places 865 on roll 2013/14 818 places 871 on roll 2014/15 818 places 856 on roll 2015/16 818 places 857 on roll 2016/17 818 places 931 on roll 2017/18 900 places 967 on roll 2018/19 900 places 967 on roll 2020/21 1,050 places 1,165 on roll 2021/22 1,150 places 1,211 on roll 2022/23 1,150 places 1,231 on roll 2023/24 1,150 places 1,176 on roll 2024/25 1,150 places 1,119 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.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Marling School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Marling School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
13 October 2020 No fault found ADA3675

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

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 GL5 4HE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137123).

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.