School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Chorlton High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 48 families who named Chorlton High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 286 and 293 put it first.

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

1.02

first choices for every place available

293 first preferences for 286 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Chorlton High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Chorlton 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 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

Chorlton High School turned first-choice families away in 9 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 3 of those years. In the other 6 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 Chorlton 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 0.87 per place 259 first choices 297 places 2016/17 0.92 per place 275 first choices 299 places 2017/18 1 per place 296 first choices 297 places 2018/19 1.04 per place 311 first choices 298 places 2019/20 0.82 per place 242 first choices 296 places 2020/21 0.94 per place 279 first choices 298 places 2021/22 0.94 per place 274 first choices 293 places 2022/23 0.84 per place 243 first choices 290 places 2023/24 0.91 per place 294 first choices 323 places 2024/25 0.89 per place 255 first choices 285 places 2025/26 1.09 per place 302 first choices 276 places 2026/27 1.02 per place 293 first choices 286 places
First preferences per place at Chorlton High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 293 first preferences for 286 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Chorlton 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
2015/16 297 259 218 0.87
2016/17 299 275 240 0.92
2017/18 297 296 238 1
2018/19 298 311 248 1.04
2019/20 296 242 229 0.82
2020/21 298 279 249 0.94
2021/22 293 274 238 0.94
2022/23 290 243 231 0.84
2023/24 323 294 262 0.91
2024/25 285 255 234 0.89
2025/26 276 302 241 1.09
2026/27 286 293 245 1.02

Places offered

286

in 2026/27

Named first choice

293

914 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

83.6%

245 of 293

Offers to families outside the council

9%

26 of 286 offers

How close you had to live

Chorlton High School filled its places in 2026, and 2,213m — 1.38 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

1.38 mi

2,213 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

1,603

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,528

95.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

75

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 Chorlton 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 Chorlton High School reported 75 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 95.3% 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Chorlton High School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,500 places 1,485 on roll 2013/14 1,500 places 1,496 on roll 2014/15 1,500 places 1,506 on roll 2015/16 1,500 places 1,498 on roll 2016/17 1,500 places 1,486 on roll 2017/18 1,500 places 1,481 on roll 2018/19 1,500 places 1,490 on roll 2020/21 1,500 places 1,524 on roll 2021/22 1,500 places 1,521 on roll 2022/23 1,500 places 1,505 on roll 2023/24 1,500 places 1,528 on roll 2024/25 1,603 places 1,528 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. Chorlton High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Chorlton High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
16 September 2014 Arrangements did not comply ADA2691

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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Manchester

Postcode M21 7SL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139148).

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.