School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Gateacre School?

In 2026/27, Gateacre School offered 216 places and 119 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.55

first choices for every place available

119 first preferences for 216 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Gateacre School

There is no published appeal success rate for Gateacre 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

Gateacre School turned first-choice families away in 2 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 1 of those years. In the other 1 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 Gateacre 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 0.79 per place 134 first choices 169 places 2016/17 0.69 per place 107 first choices 155 places 2017/18 0.78 per place 122 first choices 157 places 2018/19 0.85 per place 110 first choices 129 places 2019/20 0.79 per place 129 first choices 163 places 2020/21 0.79 per place 151 first choices 192 places 2021/22 0.82 per place 165 first choices 200 places 2022/23 1.09 per place 262 first choices 240 places 2023/24 0.91 per place 229 first choices 252 places 2024/25 0.97 per place 229 first choices 237 places 2025/26 0.69 per place 31 first choices 45 places 2026/27 0.55 per place 119 first choices 216 places
First preferences per place at Gateacre School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 119 first preferences for 216 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Gateacre School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 169 134 134 0.79
2016/17 155 107 107 0.69
2017/18 157 122 122 0.78
2018/19 129 110 110 0.85
2019/20 163 129 129 0.79
2020/21 192 151 151 0.79
2021/22 200 165 165 0.82
2022/23 240 262 210 1.09
2023/24 252 229 214 0.91
2024/25 237 229 203 0.97
2025/26 45 31 28 0.69
2026/27 216 119 119 0.55

Places offered

216

in 2026/27

Named first choice

119

350 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

119 of 119

Offers to families outside the council

17%

31 of 184 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 104700.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Gateacre 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 Gateacre 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 children who were previously looked after by immediately after being looked after became subject to adoption, a child arrangements order, or special guardianship order
2 Pupil with an Education Health and Care Plan.
3 Students whose brothers or sisters attend Gateacre in September 2027
4 Priority will next be given to children of members of staff who have been employed at this school for more than two years or recruited within the past two years to fill a vacancy for which there was a skills shortage.
5 Students living closest to Gateacre School. The distance will be measured by straight line distance between the child’s permanent home address and the Gateacre School main entrance in Hedgefield road using the local authority’s computerised measuring system. Where priority cannot be determined at (5) on account of the prospective pupils living identical distances from school priority will be determined through the process of independently verified random allocation. This includes where pupils live in the same block of flats or are twins/triplets or other multiple birth. Applicants who do not sit the assessment tests will be considered after applicants who took the test. […] criterion continues in the source document
6 Children in public care ‘Looked After Children’ 2) Children with EHCP in place.
7 Children whose brothers or sisters attend Gateacre School in September 2027
8 Children of staff working at the school who meet the criteria stated above
9 Children living closest to Gateacre School. The distance will be measured by straight line distance between the child’s permanent home address and the main entrance to the Academy in Hedgefield Road using the local authority’s computerised measuring system. Again where priority cannot be determined at (5) on account of the prospective pupils living identical distances from Gateacre School priority will be determined through the process of independently verified random allocation. This includes where perspective pupils live in the same block of flats or are twins/triplets or other multiple birth. Where the number of applications for admission in the sixth form is greater than the

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.

Gateacre 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

1,256

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,146

91.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

110

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

172

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 Gateacre 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 Gateacre School reported 110 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 91.2% 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 Gateacre School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 950 1,900 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,812 places 1,361 on roll 2010/11 1,400 places 1,324 on roll 2011/12 1,400 places 1,341 on roll 2012/13 1,400 places 1,289 on roll 2013/14 1,400 places 1,277 on roll 2014/15 1,400 places 1,227 on roll 2015/16 1,400 places 1,130 on roll 2016/17 1,400 places 1,022 on roll 2017/18 1,400 places 982 on roll 2018/19 1,400 places 924 on roll 2020/21 1,400 places 1,017 on roll 2021/22 1,428 places 1,090 on roll 2022/23 1,428 places 1,158 on roll 2023/24 1,428 places 1,196 on roll 2024/25 1,428 places 1,199 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Liverpool

Postcode L25 2RW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 150956).

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.