School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Severn Vale School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 20 families who named Severn Vale School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 264 and 277 put it first.

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

1.05

first choices for every place available

277 first preferences for 264 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Severn Vale School

There is no published appeal success rate for Severn Vale 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

Severn Vale School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 10 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 Severn Vale 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 1.03 per place 237 first choices 231 places 2016/17 0.97 per place 225 first choices 231 places 2017/18 1.06 per place 242 first choices 228 places 2018/19 1.03 per place 272 first choices 263 places 2019/20 1.08 per place 282 first choices 262 places 2020/21 1.05 per place 269 first choices 257 places 2021/22 0.92 per place 239 first choices 260 places 2022/23 1.07 per place 282 first choices 263 places 2023/24 1.1 per place 294 first choices 267 places 2024/25 1.12 per place 298 first choices 265 places 2025/26 1.09 per place 283 first choices 259 places 2026/27 1.05 per place 277 first choices 264 places
First preferences per place at Severn Vale School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 277 first preferences for 264 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Severn Vale School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 231 237 203 1.03
2016/17 231 225 206 0.97
2017/18 228 242 198 1.06
2018/19 263 272 233 1.03
2019/20 262 282 241 1.08
2020/21 257 269 238 1.05
2021/22 260 239 200 0.92
2022/23 263 282 250 1.07
2023/24 267 294 248 1.1
2024/25 265 298 256 1.12
2025/26 259 283 242 1.09
2026/27 264 277 257 1.05

Places offered

264

in 2026/27

Named first choice

277

566 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

92.8%

257 of 277

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 264 offers

How close you had to live

Severn Vale School filled its places in 2025, and 4,007m — 2.49 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the catchment criterion.

Last place offered at

2.49 mi

4,007 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Catchment

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 Severn Vale 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Severn Vale School, 2027 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 A 'looked after child' (Note 1) or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption (Note 2) child arrangements order (residency order) (Note
2 or special guardianship order (Note 4) 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. (Note 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. In Gloucestershire, such children are referred to as Children in Care. […] criterion continues in the source document
3 Children living in the priority catchment area normally served by the school, who will have siblings attending the school at the time the applicant child is admitted. The catchment area for the school is: Arlingham, Brookthorp with Whaddon, Elmore, Frampton on Severn, Fretherne with Saul, Hardwicke, Harescombe, Haresfield, Longney, Morton Valence, Quedgeley, Whitminster
4 Children of staff who are employed by the school.
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. 4. Children for whom only one 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. This must demonstrate that there is a very specific connection between the medical need and the facilities or resources of the school concerned.
5 Children living in the priority catchment area for the school (see above)
6 Children who live outside the priority catchment area normally served by the school, who will have siblings attending the school at the time the applicant child is admitted.
7 Other 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. Please note that a “sibling” is defined in these arrangements as a child who lives as a brother or sister in the same house, including natural brothers or sisters, adopted siblings, stepbrothers, stepsisters and foster brothers or sisters.

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.

Severn Vale 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

1,325

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,337

100.9% of capacity

Over its capacity by

12

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

0

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 Severn Vale 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 Severn Vale 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 Severn Vale School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,175 places 1,167 on roll 2012/13 1,175 places 1,173 on roll 2013/14 1,175 places 1,173 on roll 2014/15 1,175 places 1,171 on roll 2015/16 1,175 places 1,169 on roll 2016/17 1,175 places 1,167 on roll 2017/18 1,175 places 1,178 on roll 2018/19 1,325 places 1,214 on roll 2020/21 1,325 places 1,275 on roll 2021/22 1,325 places 1,310 on roll 2022/23 1,325 places 1,353 on roll 2023/24 1,325 places 1,343 on roll 2024/25 1,325 places 1,337 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 GL2 4PR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137298).

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.