School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Lincoln Christ's Hospital School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 41 families who named Lincoln Christ's Hospital School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 214 and 225 put it first.

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

1.05

first choices for every place available

225 first preferences for 214 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Lincoln Christ's Hospital School

There is no published appeal success rate for Lincoln Christ's Hospital 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 Lincolnshire 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 Lincolnshire, 40.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 778 of 1,930 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 Lincolnshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Lincolnshire 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

Lincoln Christ's Hospital School turned first-choice families away in 5 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 Lincoln Christ's Hospital 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 0.94 per place 209 first choices 222 places 2016/17 1.07 per place 239 first choices 224 places 2017/18 0.87 per place 209 first choices 241 places 2018/19 0.81 per place 150 first choices 185 places 2019/20 0.9 per place 164 first choices 183 places 2020/21 0.88 per place 184 first choices 208 places 2021/22 0.88 per place 182 first choices 206 places 2022/23 0.86 per place 190 first choices 221 places 2023/24 1.07 per place 234 first choices 219 places 2024/25 1.13 per place 242 first choices 215 places 2025/26 1.08 per place 236 first choices 219 places 2026/27 1.05 per place 225 first choices 214 places
First preferences per place at Lincoln Christ's Hospital School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 225 first preferences for 214 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Lincoln Christ's Hospital School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 222 209 207 0.94
2016/17 224 239 202 1.07
2017/18 241 209 209 0.87
2018/19 185 150 149 0.81
2019/20 183 164 164 0.9
2020/21 208 184 184 0.88
2021/22 206 182 182 0.88
2022/23 221 190 187 0.86
2023/24 219 234 183 1.07
2024/25 215 242 197 1.13
2025/26 219 236 203 1.08
2026/27 214 225 184 1.05

Places offered

214

in 2026/27

Named first choice

225

466 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

81.8%

184 of 225

Offers to families outside the council

1%

2 of 214 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Lincoln Christ's Hospital School published for 2025 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 Lincoln Christ's Hospital School, 2025 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 LOOKED AFTER CHILDREN & ALL PREVIOUSLY LOOKED AFTER CHILDREN INCLUDING THOSE CHILDREN WHO APPEAR TO HAVE BEEN IN STATE CARE OUTSIDE OF ENGLAND AND CEASED TO BE IN STATE CARE AS A RESULT OF BEING ADOPTED. A looked after child is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in Section 22 (1) of the Children Act 1989) at the time of making an application to a school. Previously looked after children are children who were looked after, but ceased to be so because they were adopted. […] criterion continues in the source document
2 SIBLINGS: A full brother or full sister, whether or not living in the same household who will be on roll at the time the applicant would start. A sibling is another child normally living for the majority of term time in the same household, for whom an adult in the household has parental responsibility as defined in the Children Act 1989 or Section 576 of the Education Act 1996.
3 CHILDREN OF STAFF - where the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made; and/or
b) The member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post at the school for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage.
4 CHILDREN RESIDING WITHIN 5 MILES OF THE ACADEMY
5 CHILDREN RESIDING IN THE SCHOOL’S DESIGNATED AREA FOR SCHOOL TRANSPORT
6 OTHER CHILDREN

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 2025 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.

Lincoln Christ's Hospital School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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

1,125

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,084

96.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

41

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

300

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 Lincoln Christ's Hospital 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 Lincoln Christ's Hospital School reported 41 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 96.4% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Lincoln Christ's Hospital School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,465 places 1,392 on roll 2012/13 1,465 places 1,394 on roll 2013/14 1,465 places 1,349 on roll 2014/15 1,465 places 1,357 on roll 2015/16 1,465 places 1,321 on roll 2016/17 1,465 places 1,316 on roll 2017/18 1,425 places 1,297 on roll 2018/19 1,425 places 1,210 on roll 2020/21 1,425 places 1,277 on roll 2021/22 1,425 places 1,294 on roll 2022/23 1,425 places 1,281 on roll 2023/24 1,425 places 1,273 on roll 2024/25 1,425 places 1,255 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
Lincolnshire

Postcode LN2 4PN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137447).

Other contested secondary schools in Lincolnshire

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.