Refused a place at Rednock School?
In 2026/27, Rednock School offered 221 places and 207 families named it as their first choice.
Below: what an appeal in Gloucestershire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
207 first preferences for 221 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Rednock School
There is no published appeal success rate for Rednock 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.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
Rednock School turned first-choice families away in 2 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 199 | 184 | 184 | 0.92 |
| 2016/17 | 199 | 190 | 190 | 0.95 |
| 2017/18 | 221 | 209 | 209 | 0.95 |
| 2018/19 | 203 | 170 | 170 | 0.84 |
| 2019/20 | 233 | 224 | 212 | 0.96 |
| 2020/21 | 224 | 210 | 210 | 0.94 |
| 2021/22 | 234 | 200 | 192 | 0.85 |
| 2022/23 | 232 | 220 | 219 | 0.95 |
| 2023/24 | 227 | 229 | 220 | 1.01 |
| 2024/25 | 220 | 207 | 207 | 0.94 |
| 2025/26 | 216 | 231 | 210 | 1.07 |
| 2026/27 | 221 | 207 | 207 | 0.94 |
Places offered
221
in 2026/27
Named first choice
207
316 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
100%
207 of 207
Offers to families outside the council
0%
0 of 217 offers
How close you had to live
Rednock School filled its places in 2025, and 7,178m — 4.46 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
4.46 mi
7,178 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.
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria Rednock School published for 2027 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | A ‘looked after child’ (1) or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption (2), child arrangements order (3) or special guardianship order (4) including those who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in care as a result of being adopted (5): (1) A ‘looked after child’ is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in Section 22(1) of the Children Act 1989) at the time of making an application to a school. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 2 | Children who have a brother or sister currently attending the school, and where that sibling will also continue to be in attendance at Rednock when the applicant enters the school. (Sibling is defined as a brother or sister, half-brother or half-sister, adopted brother or adopted sister, step brother or step sister or the child of the parent / carer’s partner and, in every case, the child must be living in the same family unit at the same address.) |
| 3 | Priority will be given to children of all staff at the school, in either of the following circumstances: |
| i. The member of staff has been employed at the school for 2 (two) or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, and / or ii. The member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. | |
| 4 | Children who live in the priority catchment area i.e. the parishes of Dursley, Cam, Coaley, Uley, Stinchcombe, Owlpen, Nympsfield, Slimbridge, Alkington, Ham & Stone, Berkeley, Sharpness, North Nibley and Hinton & Hamfallow. A map of the catchment area is available to be viewed at school. |
| 5 | Children for whom only this particular school is appropriate due to an exceptional medical condition. Applications under this criterion will only be considered if they are supported by a written statement from the child’s doctor at the time of submitting the application. This must demonstrate that there is a very specific connection between medical need and the facilities or resources of this school. The final decision to accept a child under this category will be made by the governors’ admission sub- committee through consultation with an independent medical practitioner. |
| 6 | In the event of oversubscription in any of the above criterion, places will be allocated to children with the strongest geographical claim, measured in a straight line from the ordnance survey point of the child’s home address (including flats) to the ordnance survey point of the school, using the Local Authority’s computerised measuring system, with those living closer to the school receiving the higher priority. In the event of a tie between 2 or more children on application – once criterion 5 has been followed - a process of random allocation will be followed by the School’s Governing Body. |
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 2027 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.
Rednock School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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
1,175
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,100
93.6% of capacity
Unfilled places
75
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
233
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 Rednock 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 Rednock School reported 75 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 93.6% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- Whether this year's cut-off will be the same. The distance above is last year's and it moves with whoever applies — it is not a boundary you can be measured against in advance, and no council publishes next year's — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Foundation school
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Gloucestershire
Postcode GL11 4BY. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 115758).
Other contested secondary schools in Gloucestershire
- Pate's Grammar School 1.46 first choices per place
- The High School Leckhampton 1.45 first choices per place
- Thomas Keble School 1.33 first choices per place
- Balcarras School 1.32 first choices per place
- Stroud High School 1.32 first choices per place
- Denmark Road High School 1.29 first choices per place
- Sir Thomas Rich's School 1.29 first choices per place
- St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre 1.29 first choices per place
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.