School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Leigh Academy Minster?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 31 families who named Leigh Academy Minster as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 203 and 223 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Kent actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 2 years of official figures.

1.10

first choices for every place available

223 first preferences for 203 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Leigh Academy Minster

There is no published appeal success rate for Leigh Academy Minster, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Kent 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 Kent, 27.6% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 1,757 of 6,368 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 Kent.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Kent 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

Leigh Academy Minster turned first-choice families away in every one of the 2 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

Only 2 years of published figures exist for this school, so there is nothing to plot yet. The figures themselves are below.

View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Leigh Academy Minster, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2025/26 172 222 157 1.29
2026/27 203 223 192 1.1

Places offered

203

in 2026/27

Named first choice

223

448 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

86.1%

192 of 223

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 203 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

1,050

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

998

95% of capacity

Unfilled places

52

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

500

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 Leigh Academy Minster 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 Leigh Academy Minster reported 52 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 95% 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.

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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kent

Postcode ME12 3JQ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 150935).

Other contested secondary schools in Kent

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.