School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Sir John Thursby Community College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 2 families who named Sir John Thursby Community College as their first choice did not get a place: 199 put it first and 197 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.

2

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

199 first preferences for 223 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Sir John Thursby Community College

There is no published appeal success rate for Sir John Thursby Community 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

Sir John Thursby Community 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 Sir John Thursby Community 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 0.84 per place 173 first choices 207 places 2016/17 0.78 per place 176 first choices 225 places 2017/18 0.79 per place 177 first choices 224 places 2018/19 0.88 per place 193 first choices 220 places 2019/20 0.83 per place 184 first choices 223 places 2020/21 0.95 per place 212 first choices 223 places 2021/22 0.79 per place 175 first choices 221 places 2022/23 0.96 per place 214 first choices 222 places 2023/24 0.89 per place 202 first choices 226 places 2024/25 1.08 per place 241 first choices 223 places 2025/26 1.09 per place 243 first choices 222 places 2026/27 0.89 per place 199 first choices 223 places
First preferences per place at Sir John Thursby Community College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 199 first preferences for 223 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Sir John Thursby Community College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 207 173 162 0.84
2016/17 225 176 169 0.78
2017/18 224 177 173 0.79
2018/19 220 193 179 0.88
2019/20 223 184 175 0.83
2020/21 223 212 195 0.95
2021/22 221 175 175 0.79
2022/23 222 214 206 0.96
2023/24 226 202 194 0.89
2024/25 223 241 212 1.08
2025/26 222 243 200 1.09
2026/27 223 199 197 0.89

Places offered

223

in 2026/27

Named first choice

199

413 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

99%

197 of 199

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 222 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Sir John Thursby Community College published for 2026 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 Sir John Thursby Community College, 2026 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 All looked after children and previously looked after children must be considered/offered a place at the time when preferences are expressed (see note (vii) below); then
2 Children for whom the Governors accept there are exceptionally strong medical, social or welfare reasons for admission, which are directly relevant to the school (see

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 2026 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.

Sir John Thursby Community College's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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

1,125

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,115

99.1% of capacity

Unfilled places

10

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 Sir John Thursby Community 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 Sir John Thursby Community College reported 10 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.1% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Sir John Thursby Community 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 895 on roll 2010/11 1,050 places 959 on roll 2011/12 1,050 places 996 on roll 2012/13 1,050 places 1,004 on roll 2013/14 1,050 places 980 on roll 2014/15 1,050 places 977 on roll 2015/16 1,050 places 991 on roll 2016/17 1,050 places 1,060 on roll 2017/18 1,050 places 1,074 on roll 2018/19 1,125 places 1,100 on roll 2020/21 1,125 places 1,131 on roll 2021/22 1,125 places 1,115 on roll 2022/23 1,125 places 1,121 on roll 2023/24 1,125 places 1,119 on roll 2024/25 1,125 places 1,115 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 BB10 2AT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 134996).

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.