School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Burnage Academy for Boys?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 21 families who named Burnage Academy for Boys as their first choice did not get a place: 189 put it first and 168 of them were offered one.

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

21

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

189 first preferences for 200 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Burnage Academy for Boys

There is no published appeal success rate for Burnage Academy for Boys, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Manchester 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 Manchester, 17.4% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 202 of 1,159 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 Manchester.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Manchester 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

Burnage Academy for Boys turned first-choice families away in 2 of the last 12 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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 Burnage Academy for Boys, 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 0.6 per place 114 first choices 189 places 2016/17 0.65 per place 114 first choices 175 places 2017/18 0.72 per place 126 first choices 175 places 2018/19 0.56 per place 75 first choices 135 places 2019/20 0.53 per place 59 first choices 111 places 2020/21 0.54 per place 90 first choices 168 places 2021/22 0.57 per place 95 first choices 167 places 2022/23 0.73 per place 129 first choices 176 places 2023/24 0.8 per place 155 first choices 193 places 2024/25 0.93 per place 193 first choices 207 places 2025/26 0.92 per place 183 first choices 200 places 2026/27 0.94 per place 189 first choices 200 places
First preferences per place at Burnage Academy for Boys. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 189 first preferences for 200 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Burnage Academy for Boys, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 189 114 114 0.6
2016/17 175 114 113 0.65
2017/18 175 126 126 0.72
2018/19 135 75 75 0.56
2019/20 111 59 59 0.53
2020/21 168 90 90 0.54
2021/22 167 95 95 0.57
2022/23 176 129 128 0.73
2023/24 193 155 146 0.8
2024/25 207 193 177 0.93
2025/26 200 183 157 0.92
2026/27 200 189 168 0.94

Places offered

200

in 2026/27

Named first choice

189

435 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

88.9%

168 of 189

Offers to families outside the council

8%

15 of 200 offers

How close you had to live

Burnage Academy for Boys filled its places in 2026, and 3,463m — 2.15 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the category 5 criterion.

Last place offered at

2.15 mi

3,463 metres, 2026

Under criterion

Category 5

as the council described it

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Manchester Council, allocation statistics for 2026. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

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

1,086

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

985

90.7% of capacity

Unfilled places

101

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

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 Burnage Academy for Boys 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 Burnage Academy for Boys reported 101 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 90.7% 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.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Burnage Academy for Boys from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 1,050 places 839 on roll 2014/15 1,050 places 909 on roll 2015/16 1,050 places 955 on roll 2016/17 1,086 places 937 on roll 2017/18 1,086 places 910 on roll 2018/19 1,086 places 897 on roll 2020/21 1,086 places 865 on roll 2021/22 1,086 places 891 on roll 2022/23 1,086 places 948 on roll 2023/24 1,086 places 960 on roll 2024/25 1,086 places 985 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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Manchester

Postcode M19 1ER. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140703).

Other contested secondary schools in Manchester

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.