School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Albany Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 20 families who named Albany Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 129 put it first and 109 of them were offered one.

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

20

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

129 first preferences for 142 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Albany Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Albany 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 Lancashire 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 Lancashire, 28.4% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 768 of 2,706 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 Lancashire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Lancashire 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

Albany Academy turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 9 of those years. In the other 2 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at Albany 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 0.92 per place 135 first choices 146 places 2016/17 1.01 per place 136 first choices 134 places 2017/18 1.33 per place 177 first choices 133 places 2018/19 1.3 per place 195 first choices 150 places 2019/20 1.05 per place 154 first choices 147 places 2020/21 1.25 per place 186 first choices 149 places 2021/22 1.29 per place 188 first choices 146 places 2022/23 1.3 per place 193 first choices 148 places 2023/24 1.25 per place 186 first choices 149 places 2024/25 0.85 per place 124 first choices 146 places 2025/26 1.06 per place 135 first choices 127 places 2026/27 0.91 per place 129 first choices 142 places
First preferences per place at Albany Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 129 first preferences for 142 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Albany Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 146 135 123 0.92
2016/17 134 136 125 1.01
2017/18 133 177 132 1.33
2018/19 150 195 134 1.3
2019/20 147 154 127 1.05
2020/21 149 186 121 1.25
2021/22 146 188 133 1.29
2022/23 148 193 121 1.3
2023/24 149 186 120 1.25
2024/25 146 124 104 0.85
2025/26 127 135 102 1.06
2026/27 142 129 109 0.91

Places offered

142

in 2026/27

Named first choice

129

551 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

84.5%

109 of 129

Offers to families outside the council

1%

2 of 142 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Albany Academy 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Albany Academy, 2027 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 Highest priority will be given to looked after children and all previously looked after children who apply for a place at the school.
2 Priority will next be given to children for whom the Governors accept, based on the written opinion of professional experts, that there are exceptional medical or social circumstances affecting the child and where these needs can only be met at Albany Academy. (See note (i) below)
3 Priority will next be given to children of staff at the school, in either of the following circumstances:
a) The member of staff has been employed at the school for 2 or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, or
b) The member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage 4 A maximum of 15 places will be allocated to children attending Chorley New Road Primary Academy who have been attending the school for at least 3 consecutive school years (Years 4, 5 and 6). 5 Children living within the school’s geographical priority area with older brothers or sisters attending the school when the younger child will start, (see note (iii) below) then 6 Children living within the school’s geographical priority area, then 7 Children living outside the school’s geographical priority area with older brothers or sisters still attending the school when the younger child will […] criterion continues in the source document

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.

Albany Academy'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

756

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

719

95.1% of capacity

Unfilled places

37

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 Albany 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 Albany Academy reported 37 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 95.1% 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Albany Academy from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 400 800 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 756 places 554 on roll 2013/14 756 places 552 on roll 2014/15 756 places 585 on roll 2015/16 756 places 609 on roll 2016/17 756 places 631 on roll 2017/18 756 places 645 on roll 2018/19 756 places 685 on roll 2020/21 756 places 697 on roll 2021/22 756 places 713 on roll 2022/23 756 places 718 on roll 2023/24 756 places 714 on roll 2024/25 756 places 719 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. Albany Academy has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Albany Academy. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
25 July 2019 Arrangements did not comply ADA3507

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
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Lancashire

Postcode PR7 3AY. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138544).

Other contested secondary schools in Lancashire

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.