School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 9 families who named St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 179 put it first and 170 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.

9

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

179 first preferences for 201 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy, 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

St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy turned first-choice families away in 8 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 St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy, 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 1.14 per place 206 first choices 180 places 2016/17 1.17 per place 233 first choices 200 places 2017/18 1.08 per place 214 first choices 199 places 2018/19 1.31 per place 259 first choices 198 places 2019/20 1.21 per place 235 first choices 195 places 2020/21 1.12 per place 222 first choices 199 places 2021/22 1.11 per place 219 first choices 197 places 2022/23 0.97 per place 192 first choices 198 places 2023/24 0.97 per place 193 first choices 198 places 2024/25 0.96 per place 193 first choices 200 places 2025/26 1.05 per place 213 first choices 202 places 2026/27 0.89 per place 179 first choices 201 places
First preferences per place at St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 179 first preferences for 201 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 180 206 179 1.14
2016/17 200 233 198 1.17
2017/18 199 214 196 1.08
2018/19 198 259 197 1.31
2019/20 195 235 190 1.21
2020/21 199 222 195 1.12
2021/22 197 219 192 1.11
2022/23 198 192 186 0.97
2023/24 198 193 185 0.97
2024/25 200 193 184 0.96
2025/26 202 213 194 1.05
2026/27 201 179 170 0.89

Places offered

201

in 2026/27

Named first choice

179

892 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

95%

170 of 179

Offers to families outside the council

35%

70 of 201 offers

How close you had to live

St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy filled its places in 2026, and 5,937m — 3.69 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 12 — Any other children, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

3.69 mi

5,937 metres, 2026

Under criterion

12

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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy 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 St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy, 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 Catholic looked after and previously looked after children. (see notes 2&3)
2 Catholic children with a sibling who attends St Mary’s Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy (see note 6)
3 Catholic children who live in the primary school defined areas of St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary School Otley, a Voluntary Academy; Ss Peter and Paul Catholic Primary school, a Voluntary Academy; Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School Ilkley, a Voluntary Academy; St. Mary’s Horsforth Catholic Voluntary Academy; St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary School Pudsey, a Voluntary Academy; St. Stephen’s Catholic Primary School Skipton, a Voluntary Academy; and go to the Catholic primary schools serving those areas. (see note 4)
4 Catholic children who live in the above-named defined areas. (see note 4)
5 Catholic children who currently attend one of the Catholic primary schools (listed in 3 above) but do not live in the defined area.
6 Other Catholic children. (see note 3)
7 Other looked after and previously looked after children with a sibling who attends St Mary’s Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy. (see note 2 & 6)
8 Other looked after and previously looked after children. (see note 2)
9 Members of an Eastern Christian Church. (see note 5)
10 Other children with a sibling who attends St Mary’s Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy. (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.

St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy'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

898

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

989

110.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

91

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

350

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. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy 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. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at St. Mary's Menston, a Catholic Voluntary Academy from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,096 places 1,215 on roll 2013/14 1,096 places 1,216 on roll 2014/15 1,096 places 1,235 on roll 2015/16 1,194 places 1,207 on roll 2016/17 1,194 places 1,168 on roll 2017/18 1,194 places 1,190 on roll 2018/19 1,194 places 1,243 on roll 2020/21 1,350 places 1,268 on roll 2021/22 1,350 places 1,263 on roll 2022/23 1,248 places 1,226 on roll 2023/24 1,248 places 1,198 on roll 2024/25 1,248 places 1,206 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
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Leeds

Postcode LS29 6AE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139351).

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.