School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Gartree High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 82 families who named Gartree High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 172 and 250 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Leicestershire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 10 years of official figures.

1.45

first choices for every place available

250 first preferences for 172 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Gartree High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Gartree 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 Leicestershire 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 Leicestershire, 17.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 128 of 715 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 Leicestershire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Leicestershire 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

Gartree High School turned first-choice families away in 9 of the last 10 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Gartree High School, 2016/17 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 16/17 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2016/17 1 per place 36 first choices 36 places 2018/19 1.03 per place 156 first choices 151 places 2019/20 1.62 per place 269 first choices 166 places 2020/21 1.5 per place 249 first choices 166 places 2021/22 1.2 per place 215 first choices 179 places 2022/23 1.36 per place 245 first choices 180 places 2023/24 1.75 per place 316 first choices 181 places 2024/25 1.73 per place 300 first choices 173 places 2025/26 1.92 per place 338 first choices 176 places 2026/27 1.45 per place 250 first choices 172 places
First preferences per place at Gartree High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 250 first preferences for 172 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Gartree 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
2016/17 36 36 29 1
2018/19 151 156 90 1.03
2019/20 166 269 157 1.62
2020/21 166 249 161 1.5
2021/22 179 215 166 1.2
2022/23 180 245 177 1.36
2023/24 181 316 179 1.75
2024/25 173 300 171 1.73
2025/26 176 338 173 1.92
2026/27 172 250 168 1.45

Places offered

172

in 2026/27

Named first choice

250

780 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

67.2%

168 of 250

Offers to families outside the council

7%

12 of 172 offers

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

925

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

907

98.1% of capacity

Unfilled places

18

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 Gartree 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 Gartree High School reported 18 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.1% 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Gartree High School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 793 places 773 on roll 2013/14 793 places 774 on roll 2014/15 793 places 778 on roll 2015/16 793 places 802 on roll 2016/17 793 places 910 on roll 2017/18 879 places 675 on roll 2018/19 879 places 719 on roll 2020/21 879 places 775 on roll 2021/22 879 places 836 on roll 2022/23 925 places 859 on roll 2023/24 925 places 893 on roll 2024/25 925 places 907 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. Gartree High School has been the subject of 4 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in 3 of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Gartree High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
14 July 2023 No fault found ADA4115
24 June 2022 Arrangements did not comply ADA3909
29 April 2022 Arrangements did not comply REF3893
12 September 2018 Arrangements did not comply ADA3458

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
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Leicestershire

Postcode LE2 5TQ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138155).

Other contested secondary schools in Leicestershire

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.