School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Parrs Wood High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 27 families who named Parrs Wood High School as their first choice did not get a place: 249 put it first and 222 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.

27

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

249 first preferences for 292 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Parrs Wood High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Parrs Wood 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

Parrs Wood High School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 4 of those years. In the other 7 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 Parrs Wood 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 1.05 per place 343 first choices 328 places 2016/17 1.06 per place 346 first choices 326 places 2017/18 1.18 per place 385 first choices 326 places 2018/19 1.41 per place 418 first choices 296 places 2019/20 0.78 per place 231 first choices 298 places 2020/21 0.73 per place 218 first choices 297 places 2021/22 0.82 per place 243 first choices 297 places 2022/23 0.82 per place 239 first choices 290 places 2023/24 0.99 per place 290 first choices 292 places 2024/25 0.76 per place 222 first choices 291 places 2025/26 0.82 per place 239 first choices 292 places 2026/27 0.85 per place 249 first choices 292 places
First preferences per place at Parrs Wood High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 249 first preferences for 292 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Parrs Wood 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
2015/16 328 343 260 1.05
2016/17 326 346 261 1.06
2017/18 326 385 274 1.18
2018/19 296 418 273 1.41
2019/20 298 231 203 0.78
2020/21 297 218 194 0.73
2021/22 297 243 205 0.82
2022/23 290 239 219 0.82
2023/24 292 290 220 0.99
2024/25 291 222 199 0.76
2025/26 292 239 207 0.82
2026/27 292 249 222 0.85

Places offered

292

in 2026/27

Named first choice

249

858 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

89.2%

222 of 249

Offers to families outside the council

16%

48 of 292 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 105556.

How close you had to live

Parrs Wood High School filled its places in 2026, and 3,661m — 2.27 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

2.27 mi

3,661 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

1,590

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,501

94.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

89

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

342

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 Parrs Wood 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 Parrs Wood High School reported 89 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 94.4% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Parrs Wood High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,000 2,000 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,745 places 1,850 on roll 2010/11 1,745 places 1,811 on roll 2011/12 1,745 places 1,829 on roll 2012/13 1,745 places 1,846 on roll 2013/14 1,745 places 1,817 on roll 2014/15 1,850 places 1,830 on roll 2015/16 1,960 places 1,848 on roll 2016/17 1,960 places 1,918 on roll 2017/18 1,932 places 1,988 on roll 2018/19 1,932 places 1,981 on roll 2020/21 1,932 places 1,930 on roll 2021/22 1,932 places 1,921 on roll 2022/23 1,932 places 1,916 on roll 2023/24 1,932 places 1,907 on roll 2024/25 1,932 places 1,852 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 M20 5PG. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 143260).

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.