School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Penwortham Priory Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 25 families who named Penwortham Priory Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 151 and 164 put it first.

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

1.09

first choices for every place available

164 first preferences for 151 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Penwortham Priory Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Penwortham Priory 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

Penwortham Priory Academy turned first-choice families away in 4 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 Penwortham Priory 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 0.9 per place 125 first choices 139 places 2016/17 0.91 per place 143 first choices 158 places 2017/18 0.91 per place 147 first choices 161 places 2018/19 0.9 per place 162 first choices 180 places 2019/20 0.77 per place 134 first choices 175 places 2020/21 0.84 per place 122 first choices 145 places 2021/22 0.83 per place 114 first choices 138 places 2022/23 1.14 per place 169 first choices 148 places 2023/24 1.01 per place 150 first choices 149 places 2024/25 0.93 per place 139 first choices 149 places 2025/26 1.02 per place 153 first choices 150 places 2026/27 1.09 per place 164 first choices 151 places
First preferences per place at Penwortham Priory Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 164 first preferences for 151 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Penwortham Priory Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 139 125 125 0.9
2016/17 158 143 143 0.91
2017/18 161 147 147 0.91
2018/19 180 162 157 0.9
2019/20 175 134 133 0.77
2020/21 145 122 122 0.84
2021/22 138 114 114 0.83
2022/23 148 169 145 1.14
2023/24 149 150 134 1.01
2024/25 149 139 130 0.93
2025/26 150 153 135 1.02
2026/27 151 164 139 1.09

Places offered

151

in 2026/27

Named first choice

164

513 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

84.8%

139 of 164

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 151 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Penwortham Priory 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 Penwortham Priory 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 Looked after children or a child who was previously looked after, but immediately after being looked after became subject to 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 and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted
2 Children for whom, in the opinion of professional experts, there are exceptionally strong medical, social or welfare reasons for admission associated with the child and/or family which are directly relevant to Penwortham Priory Academy. This may include some non-statemented students who have special educational needs
3 Children of staff who have been employed by Penwortham Priory Academy for two years prior to the closing date for applications, or where the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. This applies to all staff, full and part time, who are employed by the school.
4 Children who will have a sibling in attendance at Penwortham Priory Academy at the time of transfer. The term “sibling” includes stepchildren, half brothers and sisters and adopted and foster children who are living with the same family at the same address
5 Other students with priority given to those that live nearest to Penwortham Priory Academy, in accordance with local Geographical Priority Area. The measurement will be taken in a straight line from the centre point of the residence to the centre point of the Academy, using the Lancashire Local Authority’s geographical information system (GIS)
6 Other students living outside Penwortham Priory Academy’s Geographical Priority Area.

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.

Penwortham Priory 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

1,152

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

740

64.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

412

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 Penwortham Priory 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 Penwortham Priory Academy reported 412 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 64.2% 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 Penwortham Priory Academy from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,152 places 696 on roll 2013/14 1,152 places 645 on roll 2014/15 1,152 places 606 on roll 2015/16 1,152 places 619 on roll 2016/17 1,152 places 659 on roll 2017/18 1,152 places 683 on roll 2018/19 1,043 places 734 on roll 2020/21 1,043 places 757 on roll 2021/22 1,043 places 805 on roll 2022/23 1,152 places 782 on roll 2023/24 1,152 places 756 on roll 2024/25 1,152 places 740 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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Lancashire

Postcode PR1 0JE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138948).

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.