School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Mount St Mary's Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 46 families who named Mount St Mary's Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 188 and 201 put it first.

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

1.07

first choices for every place available

201 first preferences for 188 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Mount St Mary's Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Mount St Mary'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 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

Mount St Mary's Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 5 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 3 of those years. In the other 2 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — 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 Mount St Mary'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 1.07 per place 192 first choices 180 places 2016/17 1.06 per place 189 first choices 179 places 2017/18 0.7 per place 112 first choices 160 places 2018/19 0.82 per place 148 first choices 180 places 2019/20 0.82 per place 147 first choices 179 places 2020/21 0.79 per place 143 first choices 180 places 2021/22 0.75 per place 142 first choices 190 places 2022/23 0.69 per place 124 first choices 180 places 2023/24 0.88 per place 159 first choices 180 places 2024/25 0.79 per place 143 first choices 180 places 2025/26 0.84 per place 152 first choices 180 places 2026/27 1.07 per place 201 first choices 188 places
First preferences per place at Mount St Mary's Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 201 first preferences for 188 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Mount St Mary'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
2015/16 180 192 152 1.07
2016/17 179 189 152 1.06
2017/18 160 112 112 0.7
2018/19 180 148 130 0.82
2019/20 179 147 130 0.82
2020/21 180 143 135 0.79
2021/22 190 142 140 0.75
2022/23 180 124 124 0.69
2023/24 180 159 149 0.88
2024/25 180 143 134 0.79
2025/26 180 152 140 0.84
2026/27 188 201 155 1.07

Places offered

188

in 2026/27

Named first choice

201

718 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

77.1%

155 of 201

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 188 offers

How close you had to live

Mount St Mary's Catholic High School filled its places in 2026, and 2,630m — 1.63 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 12 — Named Catholic feeder school, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

1.63 mi

2,630 metres, 2026

Under criterion

12

Named Catholic feeder school

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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

938

104.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

38

reported as full or beyond

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 Mount St Mary'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 Mount St Mary's Catholic High School was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Mount St Mary's Catholic High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 900 places 925 on roll 2010/11 915 places 929 on roll 2011/12 915 places 915 on roll 2012/13 900 places 908 on roll 2013/14 900 places 899 on roll 2014/15 900 places 913 on roll 2015/16 900 places 924 on roll 2016/17 900 places 919 on roll 2017/18 900 places 920 on roll 2018/19 900 places 944 on roll 2020/21 900 places 936 on roll 2021/22 900 places 940 on roll 2022/23 900 places 947 on roll 2023/24 900 places 944 on roll 2024/25 900 places 938 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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Leeds

Postcode LS9 8LA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 108097).

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.