School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Trinity Academy Leeds?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 127 families who named Trinity Academy Leeds as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 236 and 349 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Leeds actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 5 years of official figures.

1.48

first choices for every place available

349 first preferences for 236 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Trinity Academy Leeds

There is no published appeal success rate for Trinity Academy Leeds, 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

Trinity Academy Leeds turned first-choice families away in 4 of the last 5 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Trinity Academy Leeds, 2022/23 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 22/23 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2022/23 0.78 per place 186 first choices 239 places 2023/24 1.2 per place 289 first choices 240 places 2024/25 1.29 per place 308 first choices 239 places 2025/26 1.51 per place 362 first choices 240 places 2026/27 1.48 per place 349 first choices 236 places
First preferences per place at Trinity Academy Leeds. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 349 first preferences for 236 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Trinity Academy Leeds, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2022/23 239 186 182 0.78
2023/24 240 289 221 1.2
2024/25 239 308 216 1.29
2025/26 240 362 229 1.51
2026/27 236 349 222 1.48

Places offered

236

in 2026/27

Named first choice

349

800 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

63.6%

222 of 349

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 236 offers

How close you had to live

Trinity Academy Leeds filled its places in 2026, and 875m — 0.54 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 6 — Any other children, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

0.54 mi

875 metres, 2026

Under criterion

6

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

1,230

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

945

76.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

285

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 Trinity Academy Leeds 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 Trinity Academy Leeds reported 285 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 76.8% 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, 2021/22 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Trinity Academy Leeds from 2021/22 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2021/22 1,200 places 238 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 477 on roll 2023/24 1,200 places 719 on roll 2024/25 1,230 places 945 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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Leeds

Postcode LS9 7QL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 148560).

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.