School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 85 families who named St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 230 and 297 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

297 first preferences for 230 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre

There is no published appeal success rate for St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre, 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

St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre 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 St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre, 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 1.5 per place 331 first choices 220 places 2016/17 1.28 per place 291 first choices 227 places 2017/18 1.73 per place 397 first choices 229 places 2018/19 1.42 per place 320 first choices 226 places 2019/20 1.47 per place 336 first choices 228 places 2020/21 1.21 per place 275 first choices 227 places 2021/22 0.91 per place 207 first choices 228 places 2022/23 1.12 per place 254 first choices 226 places 2023/24 1.09 per place 249 first choices 228 places 2024/25 1.11 per place 250 first choices 226 places 2025/26 1.22 per place 276 first choices 226 places 2026/27 1.29 per place 297 first choices 230 places
First preferences per place at St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 297 first preferences for 230 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 220 331 216 1.5
2016/17 227 291 209 1.28
2017/18 229 397 216 1.73
2018/19 226 320 215 1.42
2019/20 228 336 205 1.47
2020/21 227 275 207 1.21
2021/22 228 207 157 0.91
2022/23 226 254 189 1.12
2023/24 228 249 179 1.09
2024/25 226 250 190 1.11
2025/26 226 276 200 1.22
2026/27 230 297 212 1.29

Places offered

230

in 2026/27

Named first choice

297

741 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

71.4%

212 of 297

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 230 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre 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 St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre, 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 Catholic looked after and previously looked after children. (see notes 2 & 3)
2 Catholic children who are resident in the school’s designated parish(es) (see notes 3 & 12)
3 Other Catholic children. (see note 3) 4. Other looked after and previously looked after children. (see note 2)
4 Children who are a Catechumen (see note 5)
5 Children with a parent who has been a member of St Peter’s Catholic High School & Sixth Form Centre staff for two or more years at the time of application, or who was recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage. This does not include staff who work on the school site for other employers.
6 Children with a proven aptitude in drama, music or sport (up to a maximum of 18 places) (see note 13).
7 Children of other Christian denominations whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion. (see

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.

St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre'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

1,135

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,190

104.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

55

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

550

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 St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre 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 St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre 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 St Peter's Catholic High School and Sixth Form Centre from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 900 1,800 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,685 places 1,645 on roll 2012/13 1,685 places 1,627 on roll 2013/14 1,685 places 1,627 on roll 2014/15 1,685 places 1,575 on roll 2015/16 1,685 places 1,624 on roll 2016/17 1,685 places 1,620 on roll 2017/18 1,685 places 1,535 on roll 2018/19 1,685 places 1,493 on roll 2020/21 1,725 places 1,495 on roll 2021/22 1,685 places 1,515 on roll 2022/23 1,685 places 1,499 on roll 2023/24 1,685 places 1,513 on roll 2024/25 1,685 places 1,532 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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Gloucestershire

Postcode GL4 0DD. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136982).

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.