School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Liverpool College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 171 families who named Liverpool College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 164 and 317 put it first.

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

1.93

first choices for every place available

317 first preferences for 164 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Liverpool College

There is no published appeal success rate for Liverpool College, 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

Liverpool College turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Liverpool College, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 2.79 per place 276 first choices 99 places 2016/17 2.54 per place 353 first choices 139 places 2017/18 2.92 per place 406 first choices 139 places 2018/19 2.71 per place 376 first choices 139 places 2019/20 2.81 per place 410 first choices 146 places 2020/21 2.63 per place 381 first choices 145 places 2021/22 3.52 per place 511 first choices 145 places 2022/23 2.77 per place 474 first choices 171 places 2023/24 2.64 per place 446 first choices 169 places 2024/25 2.44 per place 414 first choices 170 places 2025/26 2.03 per place 347 first choices 171 places 2026/27 1.93 per place 317 first choices 164 places
First preferences per place at Liverpool College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 317 first preferences for 164 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Liverpool College, 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 99 276 85 2.79
2016/17 139 353 121 2.54
2017/18 139 406 115 2.92
2018/19 139 376 121 2.71
2019/20 146 410 123 2.81
2020/21 145 381 119 2.63
2021/22 145 511 129 3.52
2022/23 171 474 160 2.77
2023/24 169 446 154 2.64
2024/25 170 414 165 2.44
2025/26 171 347 140 2.03
2026/27 164 317 146 1.93

Places offered

164

in 2026/27

Named first choice

317

1,668 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

46.1%

146 of 317

Offers to families outside the council

5%

9 of 164 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

1,515

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,415

93.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

100

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

250

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 Liverpool College 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 Liverpool College reported 100 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 93.4% 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Liverpool College from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 900 1,800 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 900 places 840 on roll 2014/15 900 places 969 on roll 2015/16 1,328 places 1,037 on roll 2016/17 1,328 places 1,196 on roll 2017/18 1,328 places 1,277 on roll 2018/19 1,404 places 1,379 on roll 2020/21 1,503 places 1,531 on roll 2021/22 1,553 places 1,569 on roll 2022/23 1,553 places 1,622 on roll 2023/24 1,723 places 1,646 on roll 2024/25 1,765 places 1,653 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. Liverpool College has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Liverpool College. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
26 August 2016 No fault found ADA3220
15 September 2015 Arrangements did not comply ADA2928, ADA2933, ADA2977, ADA3001

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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Liverpool

Postcode L18 8BG. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139686).

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.