School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Shuttleworth College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 29 families who named Shuttleworth College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 192 and 217 put it first.

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

1.13

first choices for every place available

217 first preferences for 192 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Shuttleworth College

There is no published appeal success rate for Shuttleworth College, 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

Shuttleworth College turned first-choice families away in 2 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 Shuttleworth College, 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 0.82 per place 83 first choices 101 places 2016/17 0.81 per place 101 first choices 124 places 2017/18 0.73 per place 79 first choices 108 places 2018/19 0.57 per place 126 first choices 220 places 2019/20 0.78 per place 179 first choices 229 places 2020/21 0.75 per place 179 first choices 238 places 2021/22 1.02 per place 205 first choices 200 places 2022/23 0.99 per place 191 first choices 192 places 2023/24 0.99 per place 228 first choices 230 places 2024/25 0.94 per place 216 first choices 230 places 2025/26 1 per place 226 first choices 227 places 2026/27 1.13 per place 217 first choices 192 places
First preferences per place at Shuttleworth College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 217 first preferences for 192 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Shuttleworth College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 101 83 83 0.82
2016/17 124 101 101 0.81
2017/18 108 79 79 0.73
2018/19 220 126 126 0.57
2019/20 229 179 173 0.78
2020/21 238 179 179 0.75
2021/22 200 205 198 1.02
2022/23 192 191 185 0.99
2023/24 230 228 223 0.99
2024/25 230 216 214 0.94
2025/26 227 226 215 1
2026/27 192 217 188 1.13

Places offered

192

in 2026/27

Named first choice

217

433 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

86.6%

188 of 217

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 192 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Shuttleworth College 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 Shuttleworth College, 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 and those who have been previously looked after, see note (x) below. 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 the college accepts that there are exceptional medical, social or welfare reasons which are directly relevant to the college (see note (i) below); then
3 Children living within the college’s geographical priority area with older brothers or sisters attending the college when the younger child will start (see note (ii) below). GEOGRAPHICAL PRIORITY AREA The perimeter of the priority area to the north and west is the border with Ribble Valley and Hyndburn. The area includes all residential addresses above a line running eastwards (and within the perimeters of this priority area) from the western border with Hyndburn across the A6068 and following the centre of a link road to the works just north of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. […] criterion continues in the source document
4 Children living within the college’s geographical priority area; then
5 Children living outside the college’s geographical priority area with older brothers or sisters still attending the college when the younger child will start (see note (iii) below); then 6. Children living outside the college’s geographical priority area (see note (iii) below).

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.

Shuttleworth College'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

1,135

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,070

94.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

65

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 Shuttleworth College 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 Shuttleworth College reported 65 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 94.3% 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 Shuttleworth College from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,050 places 924 on roll 2010/11 1,050 places 983 on roll 2011/12 1,050 places 983 on roll 2012/13 1,050 places 920 on roll 2013/14 1,050 places 853 on roll 2014/15 1,050 places 761 on roll 2015/16 1,050 places 677 on roll 2016/17 1,050 places 678 on roll 2017/18 1,050 places 738 on roll 2018/19 1,050 places 873 on roll 2020/21 1,050 places 1,069 on roll 2021/22 1,070 places 1,100 on roll 2022/23 1,070 places 1,089 on roll 2023/24 1,070 places 1,078 on roll 2024/25 1,135 places 1,070 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
Foundation school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Lancashire

Postcode BB12 8ST. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 134994).

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.