School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Oaklands Catholic School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 44 families who named Oaklands Catholic School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 223 and 251 put it first.

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

1.13

first choices for every place available

251 first preferences for 223 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Oaklands Catholic School

There is no published appeal success rate for Oaklands Catholic 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 Hampshire 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 Hampshire, 34.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 310 of 903 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 Hampshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Hampshire 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

Oaklands Catholic School 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 Oaklands Catholic 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 1.12 per place 259 first choices 231 places 2016/17 1.14 per place 263 first choices 231 places 2017/18 1.07 per place 242 first choices 226 places 2018/19 1.05 per place 241 first choices 230 places 2019/20 0.91 per place 208 first choices 228 places 2020/21 1.05 per place 242 first choices 231 places 2021/22 1.03 per place 237 first choices 230 places 2022/23 1.07 per place 244 first choices 227 places 2023/24 0.91 per place 210 first choices 230 places 2024/25 1 per place 226 first choices 225 places 2025/26 1.11 per place 245 first choices 220 places 2026/27 1.13 per place 251 first choices 223 places
First preferences per place at Oaklands Catholic School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 251 first preferences for 223 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Oaklands Catholic School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 231 259 223 1.12
2016/17 231 263 222 1.14
2017/18 226 242 223 1.07
2018/19 230 241 222 1.05
2019/20 228 208 208 0.91
2020/21 231 242 224 1.05
2021/22 230 237 214 1.03
2022/23 227 244 212 1.07
2023/24 230 210 199 0.91
2024/25 225 226 204 1
2025/26 220 245 197 1.11
2026/27 223 251 207 1.13

Places offered

223

in 2026/27

Named first choice

251

484 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.5%

207 of 251

Offers to families outside the council

22%

49 of 222 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Oaklands Catholic School 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 Oaklands Catholic School, 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 Children in Public Care This criterion provides priority for children who are (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). It can also be used for children who were previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangement, or special guardianship order. An adoption order is an order under section 12 of the Adoption Act 1976 or under section 46 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002. […] criterion continues in the source document
2 Sibling refers to brother or sister, half brother or sister, adopted brother or sister, fostered brother or sister, step brother or sister, or the child of the parent/carer’s partner where the child for whom the school place is sought is living in the same family unit at the same address as that sibling. At the time of application, the applicant must have an elder sibling on roll at Oaklands Catholic School and Sixth Form College (up to and including Year 13), who will still be on the roll at the time of the younger sibling’s admission.
3 Commitment to Practice for other Christian denominations and other recognised faiths is defined as the attendance of a parent/parents, step parent, carer or legal guardian and students in their own parish or church or place of worship. Commitment to practice will be used to assist Governors in ranking applications. A positive commitment (yes) will mean highest weighting and negative practice (no) the least weighting. If a family has moved church or place of worship during that time, then the family will be required to provide evidence from either churches or places of worship in order to prove commitment of practice at worship over the previous year.
4 Home address is defined as the address where the child lives for the majority of the time with a parent or carer who has parental responsibility for the child. Where a residence order exists under The Children Act 1990, the address of the parent named in that order will be deemed to be the student’s normal residence.
5 Catholic means a member of a Church in full communion with the See of Rome. This includes the Eastern Catholic Churches. This will normally be evidenced by a certificate of baptism in a Catholic Church or a certificate of reception into the full communion of the Catholic Church. For the purposes of this policy, it includes a looked after child in the process of adoption and living within a family where at least one of the parents is Catholic. 7.6 Baptised is defined as the student having undergone a service at which the sacrament of Christian Baptism was administered.
6 Dedicated is defined as the student having undergone a service of Presentation and Dedication in a church in which this practice is used in place of the Christian Baptism of an infant.
7 Heritage Catholic is defined as an unbaptised student with at least one parent who is a Baptised Catholic or who has been received into the Catholic Church.
8 Statement of Membership Some Christian churches do not practice infant baptism. Evidence of membership can be a baptismal certificate, dedication certificate or statement of membership made on a supplementary information form by a priest / minister of other Christian denominations.
9 Distance will be measured in a straight line: applicants living near the school have priority. Hampshire County Council’s Geographic Information System (GIS) will be used to determine distances (normally from the Ordnance Survey home address point to the school). Distance to multiple dwellings will give priority to the ground floor over the first floor and so on. On individual floors, distance will be measured to the stairs leading to the communal entrance. If the distance tie break is applied and two or more applicants have the same distance, the places will be granted by random allocation.
10 Random allocation - in the event of the distance between two children’s homes and the school being the same and there is only one place left to be allocated, the place will be allocated by lottery and witnessed by an independent observer, normally a representative of the Local Authority.
11 Multiple Siblings - If the school reaches PAN and this would involve splitting two or more siblings from the same age group living at the same home address, the Governing body would admit these children to avoid splitting the family.
12 Eastern Christian Church includes Orthodox Churches and is normally evidenced by a certificate of baptism or reception from the authorities of that Church. A list of Churches included in this category can be view

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.

Oaklands Catholic School'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

1,152

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,161

100.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

9

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

270

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 Oaklands Catholic 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 Oaklands Catholic 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 Oaklands Catholic School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,430 places 1,336 on roll 2012/13 1,372 places 1,337 on roll 2013/14 1,372 places 1,354 on roll 2014/15 1,350 places 1,374 on roll 2015/16 1,350 places 1,396 on roll 2016/17 1,350 places 1,388 on roll 2017/18 1,422 places 1,373 on roll 2018/19 1,422 places 1,349 on roll 2020/21 1,422 places 1,349 on roll 2021/22 1,422 places 1,374 on roll 2022/23 1,422 places 1,399 on roll 2023/24 1,422 places 1,370 on roll 2024/25 1,422 places 1,367 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
Hampshire

Postcode PO7 7BW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137345).

Other contested secondary schools in Hampshire

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.