School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Christ The King Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 3 families who named Christ The King Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: 75 put it first and 72 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.

3

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

75 first preferences for 95 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Christ The King Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Christ The King 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

Christ The King Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 5 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 4 of those years. In the other 1 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 Christ The King 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 0.88 per place 38 first choices 43 places 2016/17 0.94 per place 51 first choices 54 places 2017/18 0.63 per place 45 first choices 71 places 2018/19 0.89 per place 71 first choices 80 places 2019/20 1.08 per place 84 first choices 78 places 2020/21 1.15 per place 91 first choices 79 places 2021/22 0.85 per place 68 first choices 80 places 2022/23 1.01 per place 80 first choices 79 places 2023/24 0.99 per place 79 first choices 80 places 2024/25 0.71 per place 71 first choices 100 places 2025/26 1.23 per place 122 first choices 99 places 2026/27 0.79 per place 75 first choices 95 places
First preferences per place at Christ The King Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 75 first preferences for 95 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Christ The King 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 43 38 38 0.88
2016/17 54 51 51 0.94
2017/18 71 45 45 0.63
2018/19 80 71 65 0.89
2019/20 78 84 71 1.08
2020/21 79 91 75 1.15
2021/22 80 68 66 0.85
2022/23 79 80 70 1.01
2023/24 80 79 65 0.99
2024/25 100 71 67 0.71
2025/26 99 122 83 1.23
2026/27 95 75 72 0.79

Places offered

95

in 2026/27

Named first choice

75

210 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

96%

72 of 75

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 93 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 119781.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Christ The King Catholic High School 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 Christ The King Catholic High School, 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 Baptised Catholic looked after children or a child who was previously look after, but immediately after being look after became the subject of an adoption, child arrangement order, or special guardianship order or those children who appear to the school to have been in state care outside of England ceased to be in state care as result of being adopted
2 Baptised Catholic children who live in the parish of St John XXIII (covering the former parishes of St Augustine, St Ignatius, St Joseph and St Teresa), St Walburge and St Wilfrid with a sibling in the school at the time of expected admission and attend an associated primary school
3 Baptised Catholic children who live in the parish of St John XXIII (covering the former parishes of St Augustine, St Ignatius, St Joseph and St Teresa), St Walburge and St Wilfrid with a sibling in the school at the time of expected admission
4 Other Baptised Catholic children who live in the parish of St John XXIII (covering the former parishes of St Augustine, St Ignatius, St Joseph and St Teresa), St Walburge and St Wilfrid and attend an associated primary school
5 Other Baptised Catholic children who live in the parish of St John XXIII (covering the former parishes of St Augustine, St Ignatius, St Joseph and St Teresa), St Walburge and St Wilfrid
6 Other Baptised Catholic children with a sibling in the school at the time of expected admission
7 Other Baptised Catholic children
8 Other looked after children or a child who was previously looked after, but immediately after being looked after became the subject of an adoption, child arrangement order, or special guardianship order or those children who appear to the school to have been in state care outside of England ceased to be in state care as result of being adopted
9 Other children with a sibling in school at the time of expected admission and attend an associated primary school
10 Other children with a sibling in school at the time of expected admission 11. Other children. Associated schools are: St Augustine’s Catholic Primary School St Ignatius’ Catholic Primary School St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School In the event of oversubscription in any of the above criteria places will be allocated according to the following

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.

Christ The King Catholic High School'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

596

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

414

69.5% of capacity

Unfilled places

182

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 Christ The King 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 Christ The King Catholic High School reported 182 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 69.5% 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 Christ The King Catholic High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 350 700 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 600 places 345 on roll 2010/11 612 places 326 on roll 2011/12 612 places 345 on roll 2012/13 612 places 319 on roll 2013/14 628 places 306 on roll 2014/15 628 places 297 on roll 2015/16 628 places 272 on roll 2016/17 628 places 277 on roll 2017/18 628 places 294 on roll 2018/19 596 places 316 on roll 2020/21 596 places 369 on roll 2021/22 591 places 383 on roll 2022/23 591 places 398 on roll 2023/24 591 places 390 on roll 2024/25 596 places 414 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
Academy sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Lancashire

Postcode PR1 4PR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 150615).

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.