School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Winchcombe School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 1 families who named Winchcombe School as their first choice did not get a place: 88 put it first and 87 of them were offered one.

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

1

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

88 first preferences for 111 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Winchcombe School

There is no published appeal success rate for Winchcombe 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

Winchcombe School turned first-choice families away in 4 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 3 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 Winchcombe 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 0.8 per place 75 first choices 94 places 2016/17 1.12 per place 108 first choices 96 places 2017/18 0.93 per place 99 first choices 107 places 2018/19 1.15 per place 108 first choices 94 places 2019/20 1.12 per place 108 first choices 96 places 2020/21 0.94 per place 101 first choices 108 places 2021/22 0.86 per place 91 first choices 106 places 2022/23 0.86 per place 87 first choices 101 places 2023/24 0.67 per place 72 first choices 107 places 2024/25 0.87 per place 104 first choices 119 places 2025/26 0.94 per place 103 first choices 110 places 2026/27 0.79 per place 88 first choices 111 places
First preferences per place at Winchcombe School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 88 first preferences for 111 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Winchcombe 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 94 75 75 0.8
2016/17 96 108 88 1.12
2017/18 107 99 96 0.93
2018/19 94 108 88 1.15
2019/20 96 108 86 1.12
2020/21 108 101 96 0.94
2021/22 106 91 87 0.86
2022/23 101 87 87 0.86
2023/24 107 72 72 0.67
2024/25 119 104 100 0.87
2025/26 110 103 91 0.94
2026/27 111 88 87 0.79

Places offered

111

in 2026/27

Named first choice

88

324 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

98.9%

87 of 88

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 111 offers

How close you had to live

Winchcombe School filled its places in 2025, and 13,003m — 8.08 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

8.08 mi

13,003 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.

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

600

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

522

87% of capacity

Unfilled places

78

across Years 7 to 11

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 Winchcombe 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 Winchcombe School reported 78 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 87% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Winchcombe School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 300 600 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 460 places 481 on roll 2012/13 460 places 480 on roll 2013/14 460 places 476 on roll 2014/15 460 places 475 on roll 2015/16 460 places 472 on roll 2016/17 460 places 484 on roll 2017/18 460 places 492 on roll 2018/19 490 places 490 on roll 2020/21 550 places 497 on roll 2021/22 550 places 494 on roll 2022/23 550 places 472 on roll 2023/24 600 places 502 on roll 2024/25 600 places 522 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 5LB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136764).

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.