School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Julie's Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 73 families who named St Julie's Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 175 and 226 put it first.

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

1.29

first choices for every place available

226 first preferences for 175 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Julie's Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for St Julie's 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

St Julie's Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 5 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 1 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 St Julie's 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 0.75 per place 124 first choices 166 places 2016/17 0.98 per place 176 first choices 179 places 2017/18 0.74 per place 133 first choices 179 places 2018/19 0.79 per place 141 first choices 179 places 2019/20 0.74 per place 141 first choices 191 places 2020/21 0.85 per place 153 first choices 181 places 2021/22 0.69 per place 124 first choices 179 places 2022/23 0.87 per place 156 first choices 179 places 2023/24 0.92 per place 174 first choices 189 places 2024/25 0.9 per place 164 first choices 182 places 2025/26 0.99 per place 178 first choices 179 places 2026/27 1.29 per place 226 first choices 175 places
First preferences per place at St Julie's Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 226 first preferences for 175 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Julie's 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
2015/16 166 124 124 0.75
2016/17 179 176 131 0.98
2017/18 179 133 128 0.74
2018/19 179 141 133 0.79
2019/20 191 141 139 0.74
2020/21 181 153 138 0.85
2021/22 179 124 119 0.69
2022/23 179 156 132 0.87
2023/24 189 174 153 0.92
2024/25 182 164 149 0.9
2025/26 179 178 156 0.99
2026/27 175 226 153 1.29

Places offered

175

in 2026/27

Named first choice

226

483 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

67.7%

153 of 226

Offers to families outside the council

39%

68 of 175 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St Julie's 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 St Julie's 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 notes 2 and 3)
2 Catholic children who are resident in the parishes of Christ the King and Our Lady; Our Lady of the Annunciation; Our Lady of the Assumption; St John Vianney and St Mary, Woolton and for whom St Julie's Catholic High School is the nearest Catholic school. (see notes 4&5)
3 Other Catholic children. (see note 4&5)
4 Children attending one of the following Catholic Partner Primary Schools in the parishes named in criterion 2 above:
a. Christ the King
b. Holy Family, Halewood (Knowsley LA)
c. Much Woolton
d. Our Lady of Good Help
e. Our Lady of the Assumption
f. Our Lady’s Bishop Eton
g. St Andrew’s, Halewood (Knowsley LA) h. St Gregory’s i. St Mark’s, Halewood (Knowsley LA) j. St Paschal Baylon
5 Catechumens and members of an Eastern Christian Church not in full communion with Rome . (see notes 6&7)
6 Children of other Christian Ecclesial Communities whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion. (see note 8&9)
7 Children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a religious leader. (see note 10)
8 Any other children. Within each of the categories listed above, the following provisions will be applied in the following order:
• 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 15)
• The attendance of a sibling 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 the categories above (see note 14).

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.

St Julie's 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

897

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

883

98.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

14

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

169

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 Julie's 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 St Julie's Catholic High School reported 14 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.4% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at St Julie's Catholic High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,254 places 1,210 on roll 2010/11 1,267 places 1,189 on roll 2011/12 1,267 places 1,153 on roll 2012/13 1,267 places 1,097 on roll 2013/14 1,267 places 1,024 on roll 2014/15 1,267 places 991 on roll 2015/16 1,267 places 951 on roll 2016/17 1,100 places 978 on roll 2017/18 1,100 places 985 on roll 2018/19 1,100 places 1,010 on roll 2020/21 1,037 places 1,064 on roll 2021/22 1,066 places 1,039 on roll 2022/23 1,066 places 1,052 on roll 2023/24 1,066 places 1,056 on roll 2024/25 1,066 places 1,005 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 L25 7TN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 104712).

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.