School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Castle Hall Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 38 families who named Castle Hall Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 170 and 204 put it first.

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

1.20

first choices for every place available

204 first preferences for 170 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Castle Hall Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Castle Hall Academy, 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

Castle Hall Academy turned first-choice families away in 3 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 Castle Hall Academy, 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 0.65 per place 111 first choices 170 places 2016/17 0.64 per place 109 first choices 171 places 2017/18 0.69 per place 117 first choices 170 places 2018/19 0.46 per place 72 first choices 158 places 2019/20 0.33 per place 55 first choices 167 places 2020/21 0.31 per place 59 first choices 188 places 2021/22 0.52 per place 68 first choices 130 places 2022/23 0.7 per place 121 first choices 173 places 2023/24 0.68 per place 118 first choices 174 places 2024/25 1.08 per place 190 first choices 176 places 2025/26 1.19 per place 207 first choices 174 places 2026/27 1.2 per place 204 first choices 170 places
First preferences per place at Castle Hall Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 204 first preferences for 170 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Castle Hall Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 170 111 103 0.65
2016/17 171 109 99 0.64
2017/18 170 117 107 0.69
2018/19 158 72 72 0.46
2019/20 167 55 55 0.33
2020/21 188 59 59 0.31
2021/22 130 68 68 0.52
2022/23 173 121 121 0.7
2023/24 174 118 118 0.68
2024/25 176 190 173 1.08
2025/26 174 207 168 1.19
2026/27 170 204 166 1.2

Places offered

170

in 2026/27

Named first choice

204

478 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

81.4%

166 of 204

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 170 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 137399.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Castle Hall Academy 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 Castle Hall Academy, 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 (looked after children) and children who were looked after, but ceased to be so because they were adopted (or became subject of a residence order or a special guardianship order);
2 Students who have a brother or sister attending from the same address who will still be on roll at the Academy at the date of admission;
3 Children who attend an Impact Education Multi Academy Trust Primary Academy.
4 Children of staff employed at the Academy (having a permanent contract of at least two years at the time of application).
5 The proximity of a child’s home to the Academy, defined using the Local Authority’s computerised measuring system from the front door of the Academy to the home, with those living nearest being given the highest priority. If we cannot agree to requests for admission in priorities 2 to 5 above without exceeding the PAN, we will give priority up to the PAN to children living nearest the school.

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.

Castle Hall Academy'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

870

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

830

95.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

40

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 Castle Hall Academy 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 Castle Hall Academy reported 40 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 95.4% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Castle Hall Academy from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 870 places 862 on roll 2012/13 870 places 862 on roll 2013/14 870 places 869 on roll 2014/15 870 places 861 on roll 2015/16 870 places 874 on roll 2016/17 870 places 861 on roll 2017/18 870 places 857 on roll 2018/19 855 places 800 on roll 2020/21 870 places 698 on roll 2021/22 870 places 701 on roll 2022/23 870 places 751 on roll 2023/24 870 places 788 on roll 2024/25 870 places 830 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. Castle Hall Academy has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Castle Hall Academy. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
7 October 2022 Arrangements did not comply ADA3975

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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kirklees

Postcode WF14 9PH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 146367).

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.