Refused a place at St Thomas More Catholic High School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 16 families who named St Thomas More Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: 253 put it first and 237 of them were offered one.
Below: what an appeal in North Tyneside actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27
253 first preferences for 266 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at St Thomas More Catholic High School
There is no published appeal success rate for St Thomas More 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 North Tyneside 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 North Tyneside, 23.4% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 78 of 333 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 North Tyneside.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not North Tyneside ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
St Thomas More Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 6 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 260 | 262 | 255 | 1.01 |
| 2016/17 | 268 | 268 | 265 | 1 |
| 2017/18 | 266 | 273 | 257 | 1.03 |
| 2018/19 | 257 | 245 | 245 | 0.95 |
| 2019/20 | 269 | 272 | 251 | 1.01 |
| 2020/21 | 266 | 274 | 257 | 1.03 |
| 2021/22 | 270 | 273 | 260 | 1.01 |
| 2022/23 | 262 | 249 | 246 | 0.95 |
| 2023/24 | 267 | 260 | 258 | 0.97 |
| 2024/25 | 262 | 243 | 241 | 0.93 |
| 2025/26 | 263 | 267 | 250 | 1.02 |
| 2026/27 | 266 | 253 | 237 | 0.95 |
Places offered
266
in 2026/27
Named first choice
253
429 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
93.7%
237 of 253
Offers to families outside the council
3%
8 of 266 offers
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria St Thomas More Catholic High School published for 2025 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Catholic looked after and previously looked after children. (see notes 2&3) |
| 2 | Catholic children who attend a Catholic feeder primary school. (see note 3&13) |
| 3 | Other 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 4&5) |
| 6 | Other children who attend a Catholic feeder primary school. (see note 13&14) |
| 7 | Children of other Christian denominations whose membership is evidenced by a minister or faith leader. (see note 6) |
| 8 | Children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a minister or faith leader. (see note 7) |
| 9 | Children of a member of school staff who has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which application for admission to the school is made (note 11) |
| 10 | Any other children. Within each of the categories listed above, the following provisions will be applied in the following order. |
| (i) Where evidence is provided at the time of application of an exceptional social, medical or pastoral need of the child which can be most appropriately met at this school, the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made. (see note 12) (ii) The attendance of a sibling 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) |
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 2025 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.
St Thomas More Catholic High School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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
1,350
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,337
99% of capacity
Unfilled places
13
across Years 7 to 11
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 St Thomas More 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 St Thomas More Catholic High School reported 13 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. North Tyneside does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Academy converter
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- Faith
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- North Tyneside
Postcode NE29 8LF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137734).
Other contested secondary schools in North Tyneside
- Norham High School 1.78 first choices per place
- Kings Priory School 1.63 first choices per place
- Marden High School 1.31 first choices per place
- Burnside College 1.06 first choices per place
- Longbenton High School 0.91 first choices per place
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.