School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at CHS South?

In 2026/27, CHS South offered 222 places and 121 families named it as their first choice.

Below: what an appeal in Manchester actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 8 years of official figures.

0.55

first choices for every place available

121 first preferences for 222 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at CHS South

There is no published appeal success rate for CHS South, 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

CHS South turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 8 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 CHS South, 2019/20 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 19/20 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2019/20 0.57 per place 69 first choices 122 places 2020/21 0.41 per place 69 first choices 167 places 2021/22 0.28 per place 69 first choices 243 places 2022/23 0.56 per place 122 first choices 217 places 2023/24 0.55 per place 129 first choices 234 places 2024/25 0.56 per place 140 first choices 249 places 2025/26 0.66 per place 143 first choices 217 places 2026/27 0.55 per place 121 first choices 222 places
First preferences per place at CHS South. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 121 first preferences for 222 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at CHS South, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2019/20 122 69 69 0.57
2020/21 167 69 69 0.41
2021/22 243 69 69 0.28
2022/23 217 122 122 0.56
2023/24 234 129 125 0.55
2024/25 249 140 140 0.56
2025/26 217 143 126 0.66
2026/27 222 121 121 0.55

Places offered

222

in 2026/27

Named first choice

121

727 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

121 of 121

Offers to families outside the council

21%

44 of 214 offers

How close you had to live

Every applicant was offered a place at CHS South in 2026. That is the most recent round Manchester has published, and it means there was no cut-off that year — nobody was turned away for living too far, so no distance exists to be measured against.

Last place offered at

No cut-off

everyone who applied was offered, 2026

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because of how far from the school you live, and cannot allow it because you live close by. No cut-off applied here in any round Manchester has published — the school offered a place to everyone who asked for one. 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.

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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,127

93.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

73

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 CHS South 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 CHS South reported 73 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 93.9% 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, 2018/19 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at CHS South from 2018/19 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2018/19 1,200 places 178 on roll 2020/21 1,200 places 470 on roll 2021/22 1,200 places 731 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 962 on roll 2023/24 1,200 places 1,036 on roll 2024/25 1,200 places 1,127 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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Manchester

Postcode M21 7SX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 145873).

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.