School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Cotswold Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 43 families who named The Cotswold Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 241 and 276 put it first.

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

1.15

first choices for every place available

276 first preferences for 241 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Cotswold Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for The Cotswold Academy, 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

The Cotswold Academy turned first-choice families away in 10 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 The Cotswold Academy, 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 1.19 per place 247 first choices 207 places 2016/17 1.16 per place 238 first choices 205 places 2017/18 1.17 per place 245 first choices 210 places 2018/19 1.2 per place 268 first choices 224 places 2019/20 1.11 per place 259 first choices 234 places 2020/21 0.9 per place 179 first choices 200 places 2021/22 0.91 per place 221 first choices 244 places 2022/23 1.03 per place 252 first choices 244 places 2023/24 1.04 per place 257 first choices 247 places 2024/25 1.08 per place 265 first choices 245 places 2025/26 1.02 per place 246 first choices 240 places 2026/27 1.15 per place 276 first choices 241 places
First preferences per place at The Cotswold Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 276 first preferences for 241 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Cotswold Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 207 247 202 1.19
2016/17 205 238 202 1.16
2017/18 210 245 207 1.17
2018/19 224 268 212 1.2
2019/20 234 259 226 1.11
2020/21 200 179 179 0.9
2021/22 244 221 217 0.91
2022/23 244 252 238 1.03
2023/24 247 257 237 1.04
2024/25 245 265 237 1.08
2025/26 240 246 227 1.02
2026/27 241 276 233 1.15

Places offered

241

in 2026/27

Named first choice

276

479 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

84.4%

233 of 276

Offers to families outside the council

20%

47 of 241 offers

How close you had to live

The Cotswold Academy filled its places in 2025, and 21,340m — 13.26 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

13.26 mi

21,340 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 The Cotswold Academy 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 The Cotswold Academy, 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 Looked After Children/Previously Looked after Children. A ‘looked after child’i or a child who, immediately after previously being looked after, became subject to an adoptionii, child arrangements order (residency order)iii or special guardianship orderiv including those 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 adoptedv
2 Children living in the priority catchment area normally served by the school who will have siblingsvi attending the school when the younger child is admitted
3 Children living in the priority catchment area normally served by the school. A map showing this priority catchment area is available at the school for those parents who wish to access it.
4 Children of staff where the member of staff has been employed for two or more years at the time of application or to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage
5 Children who live outside the priority catchment area normally served by the school who will have siblings attending the school when the younger child is admitted
6 Other children with the strongest geographical claim, measured in a straight line from the Ordnance survey address point of the child’s home address to the central point of the school, using the Local Authority’s computerised measuring system with those living closer to the school receiving the higher priority Where any particular category covered by points 1. to 5. above is oversubscribed, criterion 6. (strongest geographical claim based on straight line distance) will be used to determine which child is offered a place. […] 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 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.

The Cotswold Academy'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

1,250

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,181

94.5% of capacity

Unfilled places

69

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

280

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 The Cotswold Academy 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 The Cotswold Academy reported 69 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 94.5% 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Cotswold Academy from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,141 places 1,179 on roll 2011/12 1,237 places 1,214 on roll 2012/13 1,237 places 1,241 on roll 2013/14 1,237 places 1,229 on roll 2014/15 1,237 places 1,262 on roll 2015/16 1,237 places 1,317 on roll 2016/17 1,237 places 1,337 on roll 2017/18 1,237 places 1,315 on roll 2018/19 1,237 places 1,372 on roll 2020/21 1,530 places 1,390 on roll 2021/22 1,530 places 1,388 on roll 2022/23 1,530 places 1,424 on roll 2023/24 1,530 places 1,469 on roll 2024/25 1,530 places 1,491 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 GL54 2BD. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136292).

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.