School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Wade Deacon High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 52 families who named Wade Deacon High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 343 and 393 put it first.

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

1.15

first choices for every place available

393 first preferences for 343 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Wade Deacon High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Wade Deacon High 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 Halton 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 Halton, 33.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 65 of 192 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 Halton.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Halton 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

Wade Deacon High School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Wade Deacon High 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 1.34 per place 400 first choices 299 places 2016/17 1.32 per place 394 first choices 299 places 2017/18 1.27 per place 418 first choices 330 places 2018/19 1.17 per place 360 first choices 308 places 2019/20 1.36 per place 421 first choices 309 places 2020/21 1.19 per place 370 first choices 311 places 2021/22 1.23 per place 387 first choices 315 places 2022/23 1.14 per place 363 first choices 319 places 2023/24 1.23 per place 395 first choices 322 places 2024/25 1.34 per place 426 first choices 317 places 2025/26 1.07 per place 350 first choices 328 places 2026/27 1.15 per place 393 first choices 343 places
First preferences per place at Wade Deacon High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 393 first preferences for 343 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Wade Deacon High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 299 400 299 1.34
2016/17 299 394 294 1.32
2017/18 330 418 328 1.27
2018/19 308 360 306 1.17
2019/20 309 421 301 1.36
2020/21 311 370 298 1.19
2021/22 315 387 300 1.23
2022/23 319 363 315 1.14
2023/24 322 395 321 1.23
2024/25 317 426 316 1.34
2025/26 328 350 325 1.07
2026/27 343 393 341 1.15

Places offered

343

in 2026/27

Named first choice

393

735 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

86.8%

341 of 393

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 343 offers

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

1,625

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,602

98.6% of capacity

Unfilled places

23

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 Wade Deacon High 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 Wade Deacon High School reported 23 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.6% 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Wade Deacon High School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,500 places 1,510 on roll 2013/14 1,500 places 1,534 on roll 2014/15 1,500 places 1,527 on roll 2015/16 1,500 places 1,562 on roll 2016/17 1,500 places 1,554 on roll 2017/18 1,500 places 1,579 on roll 2018/19 1,550 places 1,589 on roll 2020/21 1,575 places 1,597 on roll 2021/22 1,600 places 1,601 on roll 2022/23 1,600 places 1,585 on roll 2023/24 1,625 places 1,611 on roll 2024/25 1,625 places 1,602 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.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Wade Deacon High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Wade Deacon High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
3 July 2015 No fault found ADA2846

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

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
Halton

Postcode WA8 7TD. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139368).

Other contested secondary schools in Halton

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.