School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Didsbury High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 167 families who named Didsbury High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 207 and 365 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Manchester actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 7 years of official figures.

1.76

first choices for every place available

365 first preferences for 207 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Didsbury High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Didsbury 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

Didsbury High School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 7 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Didsbury High School, 2020/21 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 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2020/21 1.81 per place 378 first choices 209 places 2021/22 1.76 per place 368 first choices 209 places 2022/23 1.6 per place 325 first choices 203 places 2023/24 1.72 per place 348 first choices 202 places 2024/25 1.7 per place 346 first choices 203 places 2025/26 1.89 per place 390 first choices 206 places 2026/27 1.76 per place 365 first choices 207 places
First preferences per place at Didsbury High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 365 first preferences for 207 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Didsbury 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
2020/21 209 378 183 1.81
2021/22 209 368 190 1.76
2022/23 203 325 192 1.6
2023/24 202 348 190 1.72
2024/25 203 346 191 1.7
2025/26 206 390 197 1.89
2026/27 207 365 198 1.76

Places offered

207

in 2026/27

Named first choice

365

1,270 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

54.2%

198 of 365

Offers to families outside the council

1%

3 of 207 offers

How close you had to live

Didsbury High School filled its places in 2026, and 1,608m — 1.00 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

1.00 mi

1,608 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

1,050

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,074

102.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

24

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

300

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 Didsbury 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 Didsbury 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, 2020/21 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Didsbury High School from 2020/21 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2020/21 1,350 places 425 on roll 2021/22 1,350 places 636 on roll 2022/23 1,350 places 847 on roll 2023/24 1,350 places 1,093 on roll 2024/25 1,350 places 1,182 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 M20 2ET. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 143729).

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.