Refused a place at The Marvell College?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 38 families who named The Marvell College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 248 and 267 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Kingston upon Hull, City of actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 10 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
267 first preferences for 248 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at The Marvell College
There is no published appeal success rate for The Marvell College, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Kingston upon Hull, City of 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 Kingston upon Hull, City of, 24.4% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 220 of 901 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 Kingston upon Hull, City of.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not Kingston upon Hull, City of ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
The Marvell College turned first-choice families away in 7 of the last 10 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017/18 | 256 | 211 | 211 | 0.82 |
| 2018/19 | 221 | 193 | 193 | 0.87 |
| 2019/20 | 250 | 234 | 234 | 0.94 |
| 2020/21 | 256 | 258 | 231 | 1.01 |
| 2021/22 | 258 | 270 | 248 | 1.05 |
| 2022/23 | 257 | 261 | 247 | 1.02 |
| 2023/24 | 255 | 310 | 239 | 1.22 |
| 2024/25 | 231 | 313 | 225 | 1.35 |
| 2025/26 | 232 | 272 | 210 | 1.17 |
| 2026/27 | 248 | 267 | 229 | 1.08 |
Places offered
248
in 2026/27
Named first choice
267
482 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
85.8%
229 of 267
Offers to families outside the council
0%
0 of 248 offers
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria The Marvell College published for 2027 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Children in public care at the time when preferences are expressed and who are still in public care at the time of their admission to school, and those who have been previously looked after including children who were previously looked after outside England but ceased to be so because they were adopted or became subject to a child arrangements order or special guardianship order. 2) Significant medical factors or exceptional family circumstances. (See note (i) below) |
| 2 | Admission authorities may give priority in their oversubscription criteria to children of staff in either or both of the following circumstances: |
| • Where the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, and/or | |
| • The member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. | |
| 3 | Being a resident in our confirmed catchment area. |
| 4 | Those applicants who on the date of admission will have a sibling on roll at The Marvell College. See notes (ii) and (iii) below. |
| 5 | Geographical, with priority given to those living nearest to the school (see notes (ii) and (iv) below) |
| 6 | and 6 will be used as a tie-breaker for other criteria. |
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 2027 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 Marvell College's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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
1,378
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,222
88.7% of capacity
Unfilled places
156
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 The Marvell College 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 Marvell College reported 156 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 88.7% 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, 2016/17 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. Kingston upon Hull, City of does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Academy sponsor led
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Kingston upon Hull, City of
Postcode HU9 4EE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 142391).
Other contested secondary schools in Kingston upon Hull, City of
- St Mary's College Voluntary Catholic Academy 1.51 first choices per place
- Malet Lambert 1.16 first choices per place
- Kelvin Hall School 1.12 first choices per place
- Lift Kingswood 1.12 first choices per place
- Hull Trinity House Academy 0.97 first choices per place
- Sirius Academy West 0.85 first choices per place
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.