School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Broughton Hall Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 23 families who named Broughton Hall Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: 190 put it first and 167 of them were offered one.

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

23

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

190 first preferences for 206 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Broughton Hall Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Broughton Hall 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 Liverpool 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 Liverpool, 8.6% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 185 of 2,150 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 Liverpool.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Liverpool 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

Broughton Hall Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 6 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 2 of those years. In the other 4 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 Broughton Hall 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 0.69 per place 136 first choices 196 places 2016/17 0.71 per place 150 first choices 210 places 2017/18 1.01 per place 213 first choices 211 places 2018/19 0.86 per place 181 first choices 210 places 2019/20 0.94 per place 197 first choices 210 places 2020/21 0.86 per place 179 first choices 209 places 2021/22 0.67 per place 141 first choices 211 places 2022/23 0.64 per place 134 first choices 210 places 2023/24 0.92 per place 206 first choices 223 places 2024/25 1.02 per place 217 first choices 212 places 2025/26 0.88 per place 182 first choices 206 places 2026/27 0.92 per place 190 first choices 206 places
First preferences per place at Broughton Hall Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 190 first preferences for 206 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Broughton Hall 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
2015/16 196 136 136 0.69
2016/17 210 150 142 0.71
2017/18 211 213 169 1.01
2018/19 210 181 168 0.86
2019/20 210 197 153 0.94
2020/21 209 179 157 0.86
2021/22 211 141 136 0.67
2022/23 210 134 134 0.64
2023/24 223 206 184 0.92
2024/25 212 217 182 1.02
2025/26 206 182 173 0.88
2026/27 206 190 167 0.92

Places offered

206

in 2026/27

Named first choice

190

495 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

87.9%

167 of 190

Offers to families outside the council

20%

41 of 206 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Broughton Hall Catholic High School published for 2027 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 Broughton Hall Catholic High School, 2027 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 and previously looked after children. (see note 2)
2 Catholic children who are resident in the parishes of St Cecilia, St Cuthbert, St Oswald, St Paul, St Timothy, St Sebastian, St Margaret Mary, and St Dominic. (see notes 3 & 10)
3 Other Catholic children. (see note 3)
4 Children attending one of the following Catholic Partner Primary Schools in the parishes or former parishes named in criterion 2 above: Hope (Knowsley LA) St Margaret Mary’s (Knowsley LA) St Cecilia’s St Paul’s St Cuthbert’s St Sebastian’s St Oswald’s
5 Members of an Eastern Christian Church not in full communion with Rome . (see notes 4)
6 Children of other Christian Ecclesial Communities whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion. (see note 5)
7 Children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a religious leader. (see note 6)
8 Any other children. Within each of the categories listed above, the following provisions will be applied in the following order.
(i) Where evidence is provided at the time of application of an exceptional social, medical or pastoral need of the child which can most appropriately be met at this school, the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made. (see note 9) (ii) The attendance of a brother or sister at the school (not including the Sixth Form where there is one) at the time of enrolment will increase the priority of an application within each category so that the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made after children in (i) above (see note 7).

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 2027 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.

Broughton Hall Catholic High School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

1,054

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,029

97.6% of capacity

Unfilled places

25

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

179

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 Broughton Hall 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 Broughton Hall Catholic High School reported 25 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 97.6% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Broughton Hall Catholic High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,275 places 1,264 on roll 2010/11 1,244 places 1,310 on roll 2011/12 1,244 places 1,288 on roll 2012/13 1,244 places 1,273 on roll 2013/14 1,244 places 1,223 on roll 2014/15 1,244 places 1,223 on roll 2015/16 1,244 places 1,232 on roll 2016/17 1,244 places 1,200 on roll 2017/18 1,244 places 1,160 on roll 2018/19 1,244 places 1,165 on roll 2020/21 1,239 places 1,216 on roll 2021/22 1,233 places 1,193 on roll 2022/23 1,233 places 1,217 on roll 2023/24 1,233 places 1,237 on roll 2024/25 1,233 places 1,205 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
Liverpool

Postcode L12 9HJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 104713).

Other contested secondary schools in Liverpool

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.