School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Levenshulme High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 29 families who named Levenshulme High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 211 and 222 put it first.

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

1.05

first choices for every place available

222 first preferences for 211 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Levenshulme High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Levenshulme 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

Levenshulme High School turned first-choice families away in 8 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 7 of those years. In the other 1 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 Levenshulme 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 0.74 per place 147 first choices 198 places 2016/17 0.72 per place 143 first choices 199 places 2017/18 0.78 per place 156 first choices 200 places 2018/19 0.8 per place 159 first choices 199 places 2019/20 0.92 per place 184 first choices 199 places 2020/21 1.2 per place 239 first choices 200 places 2021/22 1.21 per place 240 first choices 198 places 2022/23 1.22 per place 239 first choices 196 places 2023/24 1.24 per place 241 first choices 194 places 2024/25 1.39 per place 299 first choices 215 places 2025/26 1.19 per place 253 first choices 212 places 2026/27 1.05 per place 222 first choices 211 places
First preferences per place at Levenshulme High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 222 first preferences for 211 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Levenshulme 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
2015/16 198 147 147 0.74
2016/17 199 143 143 0.72
2017/18 200 156 147 0.78
2018/19 199 159 153 0.8
2019/20 199 184 161 0.92
2020/21 200 239 176 1.2
2021/22 198 240 179 1.21
2022/23 196 239 181 1.22
2023/24 194 241 170 1.24
2024/25 215 299 202 1.39
2025/26 212 253 186 1.19
2026/27 211 222 193 1.05

Places offered

211

in 2026/27

Named first choice

222

527 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

86.9%

193 of 222

Offers to families outside the council

4%

8 of 211 offers

How close you had to live

Levenshulme High School filled its places in 2026, and 2,612m — 1.62 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the category 4 criterion.

Last place offered at

1.62 mi

2,612 metres, 2026

Under criterion

Category 4

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

1,002

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,050

104.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

48

reported as full or beyond

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 Levenshulme 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 Levenshulme 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, 2014/15 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Levenshulme High School from 2014/15 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2014/15 1,002 places 993 on roll 2015/16 1,002 places 1,006 on roll 2016/17 1,002 places 1,011 on roll 2017/18 1,002 places 997 on roll 2018/19 1,002 places 1,000 on roll 2020/21 1,002 places 1,002 on roll 2021/22 1,002 places 1,011 on roll 2022/23 1,002 places 1,018 on roll 2023/24 1,002 places 1,037 on roll 2024/25 1,002 places 1,050 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Manchester

Postcode M19 1FS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 141196).

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.