School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Notre Dame Catholic Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 8 families who named Notre Dame Catholic Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 145 put it first and 137 of them were offered one.

Below: what an appeal in Liverpool actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 2 years of official figures.

8

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

145 first preferences for 179 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Notre Dame Catholic Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Notre Dame Catholic Academy, 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

Notre Dame Catholic Academy turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 2 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

Only one year of published figures exist for this school, so there is nothing to plot yet. The figures themselves are below.

View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Notre Dame Catholic Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2025/26 7 8 5 too small to publish
2026/27 179 145 137 0.81

Places offered

179

in 2026/27

Named first choice

145

390 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

94.5%

137 of 145

Offers to families outside the council

4%

7 of 179 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Notre Dame Catholic Academy 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 Notre Dame Catholic Academy, 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. This includes 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.
2 Baptised Catholic children who have a sibling in the school at the time of admission.
3 Baptised Catholic children resident in parishes of Our Lady of Reconciliation, Our Lady Immaculate, St Anthony, St Francis Xavier, St John and St Sylvester and the former parishes of Holy Cross, St Alphonsus, St Joseph, St Mary’s Highfield Street and St Mary of the Angels (Friary).
4 Other baptised Catholic children.
5 Other children who have a sibling in the school at the time of admission.
6 Children attending one of the following Catholic Feeder Primary Schools in the parishes named in criterion 3 above:
7 Faith
8 Holy Cross
9 Our Lady Immaculate
10 St John’s
11 The Trinity g. Children from other Christian denominations. Proof of Baptism in the form of a Baptismal Certificate or confirmation in writing that the applicant is a member of their Faith community from an appropriate Minister of Religion is required.
12 Children of other faiths. An appropriate Faith Leader would need to confirm in writing that the applicant is a member of their faith group.
13 Other children. If it is not possible to offer places for all applicants within any criteria above then places will be allocated to the children who live nearest to the school. Distance will be measured by straight line distance between the child’s permanent home address and the school using the local authority’s computerised measuring system. In the event of distances being the same for two or more applicants where this distance would be last place/s to be allocated, we will use a system to randomly pick who will be offered a place. […] criterion continues in the source document

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.

Notre Dame Catholic Academy'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

901

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

898

99.7% of capacity

Unfilled places

3

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

135

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 Notre Dame Catholic Academy 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 Notre Dame Catholic Academy reported 3 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.7% 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.

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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Liverpool

Postcode L5 5AF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 150373).

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.