School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Allerton Grange School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 25 families who named Allerton Grange School as their first choice did not get a place: 249 put it first and 224 of them were offered one.

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

25

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

249 first preferences for 285 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Allerton Grange School

There is no published appeal success rate for Allerton Grange 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 Leeds 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 Leeds, 17.1% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 288 of 1,685 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 Leeds.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Leeds 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

Allerton Grange School turned first-choice families away in 8 of the last 12 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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 Allerton Grange 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 0.46 per place 110 first choices 238 places 2016/17 0.61 per place 145 first choices 239 places 2017/18 0.65 per place 174 first choices 269 places 2018/19 0.69 per place 183 first choices 267 places 2019/20 0.66 per place 175 first choices 267 places 2020/21 0.79 per place 236 first choices 298 places 2021/22 0.77 per place 228 first choices 295 places 2022/23 0.87 per place 256 first choices 294 places 2023/24 0.85 per place 248 first choices 293 places 2024/25 0.9 per place 267 first choices 298 places 2025/26 0.82 per place 243 first choices 296 places 2026/27 0.87 per place 249 first choices 285 places
First preferences per place at Allerton Grange School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 249 first preferences for 285 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Allerton Grange School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 238 110 110 0.46
2016/17 239 145 140 0.61
2017/18 269 174 165 0.65
2018/19 267 183 162 0.69
2019/20 267 175 162 0.66
2020/21 298 236 211 0.79
2021/22 295 228 204 0.77
2022/23 294 256 222 0.87
2023/24 293 248 216 0.85
2024/25 298 267 237 0.9
2025/26 296 243 216 0.82
2026/27 285 249 224 0.87

Places offered

285

in 2026/27

Named first choice

249

1,005 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

90%

224 of 249

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 285 offers

How close you had to live

Allerton Grange School filled its places in 2026, and 2,567m — 1.60 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 5 — Any other children, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

1.60 mi

2,567 metres, 2026

Under criterion

5

Any other children

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Leeds Council, allocation statistics for 2026. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

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

1,732

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,504

86.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

228

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

184

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 Allerton Grange 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 Allerton Grange School reported 228 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 86.8% 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 Allerton Grange School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,000 2,000 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,406 places 1,553 on roll 2010/11 1,520 places 1,497 on roll 2011/12 1,520 places 1,413 on roll 2012/13 1,500 places 1,438 on roll 2013/14 1,579 places 1,451 on roll 2014/15 1,579 places 1,436 on roll 2015/16 1,579 places 1,437 on roll 2016/17 1,579 places 1,436 on roll 2017/18 1,579 places 1,429 on roll 2018/19 1,579 places 1,487 on roll 2020/21 1,579 places 1,606 on roll 2021/22 1,800 places 1,642 on roll 2022/23 1,800 places 1,710 on roll 2023/24 1,800 places 1,737 on roll 2024/25 1,916 places 1,745 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
Community school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Leeds

Postcode LS17 6SF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 108058).

Other contested secondary schools in Leeds

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.