School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Bede's Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 44 families who named St Bede's Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 133 and 176 put it first.

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

1.32

first choices for every place available

176 first preferences for 133 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Bede's Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for St Bede's 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

St Bede's 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 St Bede's 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 1.01 per place 139 first choices 138 places 2016/17 1.16 per place 162 first choices 140 places 2017/18 1.2 per place 162 first choices 135 places 2018/19 1.61 per place 221 first choices 137 places 2019/20 1.62 per place 227 first choices 140 places 2020/21 1.47 per place 202 first choices 137 places 2021/22 1.41 per place 191 first choices 135 places 2022/23 1.18 per place 162 first choices 137 places 2023/24 1.42 per place 198 first choices 139 places 2024/25 1.3 per place 181 first choices 139 places 2025/26 1.21 per place 163 first choices 135 places 2026/27 1.32 per place 176 first choices 133 places
First preferences per place at St Bede's Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 176 first preferences for 133 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Bede's 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
2015/16 138 139 134 1.01
2016/17 140 162 136 1.16
2017/18 135 162 130 1.2
2018/19 137 221 136 1.61
2019/20 140 227 140 1.62
2020/21 137 202 137 1.47
2021/22 135 191 135 1.41
2022/23 137 162 135 1.18
2023/24 139 198 137 1.42
2024/25 139 181 138 1.3
2025/26 135 163 134 1.21
2026/27 133 176 132 1.32

Places offered

133

in 2026/27

Named first choice

176

432 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75%

132 of 176

Offers to families outside the council

8%

10 of 133 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St Bede's 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 St Bede's 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 Looked after children and previously looked after children.
2 Catholic children who are resident in the parishes of St Anne’s, Ormskirk; St Mary's, Aughton; St Elizabeth's Scarisbrick; Our Lady's, Parbold and St John's, Burscough. (see notes 3&10)
3 Other Catholic children. (see note 3)
4 Children attending one of the following Catholic Partner Primary Schools in the parishes or former parishes named in criterion 2 above: Our Lady & All Saints, Parbold St John’s, Burscough St Anne’s, Ormskirk St Mary’s Scarisbrick
5 Members of an Eastern Christian Church not in full communion with Rome. (see note 4)
6 Children of other Christian Ecclesial Communities whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion. (see note 5)
7 Children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a religious leader. (see note 6)
8 Any other children.

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.

St Bede's 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

774

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

709

91.6% 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 St Bede's 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 St Bede's Catholic High School reported 65 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 91.6% 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 St Bede's Catholic High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 400 800 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 675 places 684 on roll 2010/11 675 places 692 on roll 2011/12 699 places 691 on roll 2012/13 699 places 666 on roll 2013/14 699 places 676 on roll 2014/15 700 places 685 on roll 2015/16 700 places 691 on roll 2016/17 729 places 688 on roll 2017/18 729 places 702 on roll 2018/19 729 places 703 on roll 2020/21 729 places 717 on roll 2021/22 708 places 710 on roll 2022/23 708 places 702 on roll 2023/24 708 places 707 on roll 2024/25 774 places 709 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.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. St Bede's Catholic High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming St Bede's Catholic High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
29 August 2024 No fault found ADA4328

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

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 L39 4TA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 119792).

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.