School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Saint Paul's Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 143 families who named Saint Paul's Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 165 and 300 put it first.

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

1.82

first choices for every place available

300 first preferences for 165 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Saint Paul's Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Saint Paul's Catholic 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

Saint Paul's Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 4 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Saint Paul's Catholic 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 0.85 per place 153 first choices 179 places 2016/17 0.64 per place 107 first choices 167 places 2017/18 0.67 per place 97 first choices 145 places 2018/19 0.92 per place 97 first choices 105 places 2019/20 0.67 per place 96 first choices 143 places 2020/21 0.76 per place 124 first choices 163 places 2021/22 0.84 per place 151 first choices 180 places 2022/23 0.88 per place 167 first choices 190 places 2023/24 1.24 per place 209 first choices 169 places 2024/25 1.64 per place 270 first choices 165 places 2025/26 1.75 per place 295 first choices 169 places 2026/27 1.82 per place 300 first choices 165 places
First preferences per place at Saint Paul's Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 300 first preferences for 165 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Saint Paul's Catholic 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
2015/16 179 153 153 0.85
2016/17 167 107 106 0.64
2017/18 145 97 97 0.67
2018/19 105 97 97 0.92
2019/20 143 96 96 0.67
2020/21 163 124 124 0.76
2021/22 180 151 151 0.84
2022/23 190 167 164 0.88
2023/24 169 209 157 1.24
2024/25 165 270 156 1.64
2025/26 169 295 158 1.75
2026/27 165 300 157 1.82

Places offered

165

in 2026/27

Named first choice

300

548 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

52.3%

157 of 300

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 165 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Saint Paul's Catholic High School published for 2026 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for Saint Paul's Catholic High School, 2026 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Baptised Catholic looked after and previously looked after children. (see notes 2&3)
2 Baptised Catholic children who attend a feeder Catholic primary school, namely, Saint Anthony’s Catholic Primary School, St John Fisher & Thomas More Primary School, St Elizabeth’s Catholic Primary School, St Peters Catholic Primary School, Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School, St Aidan’s Catholic Primary school. (see notes 3&4)
3 Other Baptised Catholic children. (see note 3)
4 Other looked after and previously looked after children. (see note 2)
5 Catechumens and members of an Eastern Christian Church. (see notes 5&6)
6 Children of other Christian denominations and children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion or other religious leader. (see notes 7&8)
7 Any other children. Within each of the categories listed above, the following provisions will be applied in the following order.
8 The attendance of a brother or sister at the school at the time of enrolment will increase the priority of an application within each category so that the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made after children in (i) above. (see note 9)
9 The children of staff will be given increased priority within each category so that the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made after children in (i) above (see note 10).

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2026 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

Saint Paul's Catholic High School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

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

1,056

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

943

89.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

113

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 Saint Paul's Catholic 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 Saint Paul's Catholic High School reported 113 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 89.3% 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 Saint Paul's Catholic High School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 900 places 853 on roll 2013/14 900 places 850 on roll 2014/15 900 places 853 on roll 2015/16 900 places 832 on roll 2016/17 900 places 777 on roll 2017/18 900 places 756 on roll 2018/19 900 places 742 on roll 2020/21 900 places 853 on roll 2021/22 900 places 906 on roll 2022/23 900 places 922 on roll 2023/24 900 places 939 on roll 2024/25 1,056 places 943 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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Manchester

Postcode M23 2YS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139456).

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.