School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Hilda's Church of England High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 129 families who named St Hilda's Church of England High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 152 and 269 put it first.

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

1.77

first choices for every place available

269 first preferences for 152 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Hilda's Church of England High School

There is no published appeal success rate for St Hilda's Church of England 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

St Hilda's Church of England High School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 11 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 St Hilda's Church of England High School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.6 1.3 1.9 2.5 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 0.97 per place 143 first choices 148 places 2016/17 1.11 per place 166 first choices 149 places 2017/18 1.66 per place 249 first choices 150 places 2018/19 1.59 per place 268 first choices 169 places 2019/20 1.77 per place 298 first choices 168 places 2020/21 2.2 per place 367 first choices 167 places 2021/22 1.98 per place 333 first choices 168 places 2022/23 1.71 per place 287 first choices 168 places 2023/24 1.89 per place 323 first choices 171 places 2024/25 1.67 per place 297 first choices 178 places 2025/26 1.64 per place 248 first choices 151 places 2026/27 1.77 per place 269 first choices 152 places
First preferences per place at St Hilda's Church of England High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 269 first preferences for 152 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Hilda's Church of England 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
2015/16 148 143 112 0.97
2016/17 149 166 99 1.11
2017/18 150 249 109 1.66
2018/19 169 268 122 1.59
2019/20 168 298 139 1.77
2020/21 167 367 144 2.2
2021/22 168 333 149 1.98
2022/23 168 287 139 1.71
2023/24 171 323 148 1.89
2024/25 178 297 162 1.67
2025/26 151 248 130 1.64
2026/27 152 269 140 1.77

Places offered

152

in 2026/27

Named first choice

269

1,197 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

52%

140 of 269

Offers to families outside the council

12%

18 of 152 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St Hilda's Church of England High School published for 2026 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 St Hilda's Church of England High School, 2026 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 or children who were looked after, but ceased to be so because they were adopted (or became subject to a child arrangement order or special guardianship order).
2 Meeting the specific entry criteria for their chosen programme of study where places are still available on the programme.
3 Should a tie breaker be needed for pupils of equal scores then random allocation will be used which is supervised by the local authority. When the limit for places is reached, applicants will be placed on a waiting list which will be maintained until the Friday of the second week in September. Should admission to the Sixth Form be refused, applicants will be provided with details of the statutory appeal procedure. Both applicants and their parents may submit an appeal. Application form for Sixth Form College can be found in the College section of the school website.

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 2026 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.

St Hilda's Church of England High School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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

847

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

871

102.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

24

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

195

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 St Hilda's Church of England 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 St Hilda's Church of England High School was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at St Hilda's Church of England High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 838 places 851 on roll 2010/11 838 places 837 on roll 2011/12 838 places 835 on roll 2012/13 838 places 808 on roll 2013/14 838 places 793 on roll 2014/15 838 places 781 on roll 2015/16 937 places 813 on roll 2016/17 937 places 825 on roll 2017/18 937 places 869 on roll 2018/19 937 places 956 on roll 2020/21 995 places 1,059 on roll 2021/22 1,042 places 1,095 on roll 2022/23 1,042 places 1,117 on roll 2023/24 1,042 places 1,117 on roll 2024/25 1,042 places 1,131 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. St Hilda's Church of England High School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming St Hilda's Church of England High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
22 September 2021 No fault found VAR2163
22 September 2021 No fault found ADA3877

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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Liverpool

Postcode L17 3AL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 104721).

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.