School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at All Saints Catholic College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 52 families who named All Saints Catholic College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 174 and 216 put it first.

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

1.24

first choices for every place available

216 first preferences for 174 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at All Saints Catholic College

There is no published appeal success rate for All Saints Catholic 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 Kirklees 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 Kirklees, 39.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 345 of 880 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 Kirklees.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Kirklees 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

All Saints Catholic College turned first-choice families away in 8 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 All Saints Catholic College, 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 0.89 per place 125 first choices 141 places 2016/17 0.89 per place 101 first choices 113 places 2017/18 0.82 per place 145 first choices 176 places 2018/19 0.94 per place 166 first choices 176 places 2019/20 1.08 per place 189 first choices 175 places 2020/21 1.02 per place 180 first choices 176 places 2021/22 1.15 per place 202 first choices 176 places 2022/23 1.11 per place 193 first choices 174 places 2023/24 1.25 per place 212 first choices 170 places 2024/25 1.18 per place 204 first choices 173 places 2025/26 1.02 per place 181 first choices 177 places 2026/27 1.24 per place 216 first choices 174 places
First preferences per place at All Saints Catholic College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 216 first preferences for 174 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at All Saints Catholic College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 141 125 125 0.89
2016/17 113 101 100 0.89
2017/18 176 145 142 0.82
2018/19 176 166 158 0.94
2019/20 175 189 158 1.08
2020/21 176 180 147 1.02
2021/22 176 202 152 1.15
2022/23 174 193 160 1.11
2023/24 170 212 153 1.25
2024/25 173 204 164 1.18
2025/26 177 181 165 1.02
2026/27 174 216 164 1.24

Places offered

174

in 2026/27

Named first choice

216

424 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75.9%

164 of 216

Offers to families outside the council

11%

19 of 174 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria All Saints Catholic College published for 2025 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 All Saints Catholic College, 2025 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 Catholic looked after and previously looked after children (see notes 2 & 3).
2 Catholic children with a sibling who attends All Saints Catholic College (see note 6).
3 Catholic children who live in the primary school defined areas of St Patrick’s Birkby, Our Lady of Lourdes Bradley, St Joseph’s Dalton, St Joseph’s Brighouse and St Patrick’s Elland, St Mary’s Halifax, Sacred Heart Sowerby Bridge, St Malachy’s Halifax, St Joseph’s Halifax and go to the Catholic primary schools serving those areas (see note 5).
4 Catholic children who live in the above-named defined areas (see note 5).
5 Catholic children who currently attend one of the Catholic primary schools (listed in 3 above) but do not live in the defined area.
6 Other Catholic children (see note 3).
7 Other looked after and previously looked after children with a sibling who attends All Saints Catholic College (see note 2 & 6).
8 Other looked after and previously looked after children (see note 2).
9 Members of an Eastern Christian Church (see note 5).
10 Other children with a sibling who attends All Saints Catholic College (see note 8).
11 Other children who currently attend one of the Catholic primary schools serving the areas of St Patrick’s Birkby, Our Lady of Lourdes Bradley, St Joseph’s Dalton, St Joseph’s Brighouse and St Patrick’s Elland, St Mary’s Halifax, Sacred Heart Sowerby Bridge, St Malachy’s Halifax, St Joseph’s Halifax.
12 Any other children.

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 2025 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.

All Saints Catholic College's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

898

99.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

2

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 All Saints Catholic 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 All Saints Catholic College reported 2 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.8% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at All Saints Catholic College from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,000 places 821 on roll 2010/11 1,000 places 817 on roll 2011/12 1,000 places 793 on roll 2012/13 1,000 places 717 on roll 2013/14 930 places 687 on roll 2014/15 930 places 662 on roll 2015/16 930 places 665 on roll 2016/17 930 places 664 on roll 2017/18 900 places 722 on roll 2018/19 900 places 784 on roll 2020/21 900 places 859 on roll 2021/22 900 places 886 on roll 2022/23 900 places 896 on roll 2023/24 900 places 900 on roll 2024/25 900 places 898 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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kirklees

Postcode HD2 2JT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 107782).

Other contested secondary schools in Kirklees

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.