School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at All Hallows Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 33 families who named All Hallows Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 171 and 201 put it first.

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

1.18

first choices for every place available

201 first preferences for 171 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at All Hallows Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for All Hallows Catholic High School, 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

All Hallows Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at All Hallows Catholic High School, 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 1.1 per place 192 first choices 174 places 2016/17 1.08 per place 193 first choices 178 places 2017/18 1.04 per place 183 first choices 176 places 2018/19 1.14 per place 201 first choices 176 places 2019/20 1.1 per place 195 first choices 178 places 2020/21 1.22 per place 217 first choices 178 places 2021/22 1.01 per place 178 first choices 176 places 2022/23 1.06 per place 186 first choices 175 places 2023/24 1.2 per place 213 first choices 178 places 2024/25 1.16 per place 205 first choices 176 places 2025/26 1.13 per place 200 first choices 177 places 2026/27 1.18 per place 201 first choices 171 places
First preferences per place at All Hallows Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 201 first preferences for 171 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at All Hallows Catholic High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 174 192 171 1.1
2016/17 178 193 177 1.08
2017/18 176 183 172 1.04
2018/19 176 201 172 1.14
2019/20 178 195 175 1.1
2020/21 178 217 176 1.22
2021/22 176 178 170 1.01
2022/23 175 186 171 1.06
2023/24 178 213 176 1.2
2024/25 176 205 171 1.16
2025/26 177 200 172 1.13
2026/27 171 201 168 1.18

Places offered

171

in 2026/27

Named first choice

201

565 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

83.6%

168 of 201

Offers to families outside the council

2%

3 of 171 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria All Hallows Catholic High School 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 Hallows Catholic High School, 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 Looked after children and previously looked after children. This includes children who appear to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted.
2 Baptised Catholic children who have a sibling in the school at the time of admission.
3 Baptised Catholic children resident in the parishes of St Oswald’s, Longton; St Teresa’s, Penwortham; St Mary Magdalen’s, Penwortham; Our Lady & St Gerard’s, Lostock Hall and Our Lady’s, Tarleton.
4 Other baptised Catholic children.
5 Other children who have a sibling in the school at the time of admission.
6 Children attending one of the following Catholic Feeder Primary Schools in the parishes named in criterion 3 above: Our Lady & St Gerard’s, Lostock Hall St Oswald’s, Longton St Mary Magdalen’s St Teresa’s, Penwortham 7. Children from other Christian denominations. Proof of Baptism in the form of a Baptismal Certificate or confirmation in writing that the applicant is a member of their Faith community from an appropriate Minister of Religion is required.
7 Children of other faiths. An appropriate Faith Leader would need to confirm in writing that the applicant is a member of their faith group.
8 Other children. Where there are more applicants for the available places within a category, then the distance between the Ordnance Survey address points for the school and the home measured in a straight line will be used as the final determining factor, nearer addresses having priority over more distant ones. This address point is within the body of the property and usually located at its centre. Where the cut-off point is for addresses within the same building, then the single measure between address points will apply and the Local Authority’s system of a random draw will determine which address(es) receive the offer(s). […] 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 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 Hallows Catholic High School'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

915

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

910

99.5% of capacity

Unfilled places

5

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 Hallows Catholic High School 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 Hallows Catholic High School reported 5 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.5% 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 Hallows Catholic High School 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 2009/10 894 places 903 on roll 2010/11 894 places 904 on roll 2011/12 894 places 892 on roll 2012/13 894 places 892 on roll 2013/14 894 places 889 on roll 2014/15 894 places 894 on roll 2015/16 894 places 896 on roll 2016/17 894 places 893 on roll 2017/18 915 places 893 on roll 2018/19 915 places 901 on roll 2020/21 915 places 900 on roll 2021/22 915 places 893 on roll 2022/23 915 places 905 on roll 2023/24 915 places 912 on roll 2024/25 915 places 910 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
Lancashire

Postcode PR1 0LN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 119802).

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.