School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Ashfield Comprehensive School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 9 families who named Ashfield Comprehensive School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 406 and 408 put it first.

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

1

first choices for every place available

408 first preferences for 406 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Ashfield Comprehensive School

There is no published appeal success rate for Ashfield Comprehensive 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 Nottinghamshire 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 Nottinghamshire, 24.7% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 340 of 1,374 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 Nottinghamshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Nottinghamshire 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

Ashfield Comprehensive School turned first-choice families away in 9 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 Ashfield Comprehensive 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 0.96 per place 365 first choices 381 places 2016/17 0.96 per place 388 first choices 405 places 2017/18 1 per place 406 first choices 404 places 2018/19 0.97 per place 373 first choices 385 places 2019/20 1 per place 396 first choices 395 places 2020/21 1.21 per place 489 first choices 405 places 2021/22 1.08 per place 439 first choices 405 places 2022/23 1.34 per place 542 first choices 405 places 2023/24 1.22 per place 500 first choices 410 places 2024/25 1.21 per place 485 first choices 402 places 2025/26 1.15 per place 465 first choices 405 places 2026/27 1 per place 408 first choices 406 places
First preferences per place at Ashfield Comprehensive School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 408 first preferences for 406 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Ashfield Comprehensive School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 381 365 365 0.96
2016/17 405 388 388 0.96
2017/18 404 406 394 1
2018/19 385 373 373 0.97
2019/20 395 396 381 1
2020/21 405 489 397 1.21
2021/22 405 439 390 1.08
2022/23 405 542 404 1.34
2023/24 410 500 409 1.22
2024/25 402 485 401 1.21
2025/26 405 465 405 1.15
2026/27 406 408 399 1

Places offered

406

in 2026/27

Named first choice

408

730 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

97.8%

399 of 408

Offers to families outside the council

1%

4 of 406 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Ashfield Comprehensive 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 Ashfield Comprehensive 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 Looked After Children and all previously Looked After Children, including those children who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted.
2 Children living in the normal area served by the school at the time of application and admission who have brothers or sisters attending the school at the time of application and admission.
3 Children living in the normal area served by the school at the time of application and admission.
4 Children who live outside the catchment area but who are attending one of the linked primary schools in Ashfield School’s family of schools on the closing date for applications preceding admission to secondary school and who will have a brother or sister at Ashfield School at the time of admission.
5 Children not living in the normal area served by the school but who have brothers or sisters attending the school at the time of application and admission.
6 Children who live outside the catchment area but who are attending a linked primary phase school on the closing date for secondary applications.
7 Other children whose parents/carers have requested a place. Sixth Form The Published Admission number is 100 external places with a total of 300 students in Year 12. Ashfield School Sixth form is committed to providing places on an open-access basis. Our entry requirements are generic and indicative only. The sixth form is committed to recruiting with integrity. Careers education and information, advice and guidance is provided at all stages and takes into account a range of factors including GCSE score, predicted grade, actual grade and other factors. The Sixth Form reserves the right to refuse admission to a course in some cases, even where the generic requirements are met. […] criterion continues in the source document
• Looked After Children and all previously Looked After Children, including those children who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted.
• Children who do not presently attend the school, but who meet the academic entry requirements. In the event of oversubscription of the above criteria, proximity to the school will be used with those living nearer to the school given priority. Distance measurement is as the crow flies from the home address to the school using google maps. Entry Requirements A Levels: You need a minimum of 6 GCSEs at Grade 5 or better (one of which must be English or Maths) Individual subjects will also have set their own requirements. […] criterion continues in the source document

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.

Ashfield Comprehensive 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

2,095

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

2,008

95.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

87

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

650

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 Ashfield Comprehensive 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 Ashfield Comprehensive School reported 87 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 95.8% 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

Places and pupils on roll at Ashfield Comprehensive School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,600 3,200 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 3,128 places 2,472 on roll 2012/13 3,173 places 2,461 on roll 2013/14 3,173 places 2,461 on roll 2014/15 2,964 places 2,461 on roll 2015/16 2,964 places 2,487 on roll 2016/17 2,964 places 2,445 on roll 2017/18 2,964 places 2,479 on roll 2018/19 3,146 places 2,479 on roll 2020/21 2,745 places 2,640 on roll 2021/22 2,745 places 2,654 on roll 2022/23 2,745 places 2,664 on roll 2023/24 2,745 places 2,614 on roll 2024/25 2,745 places 2,560 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
Nottinghamshire

Postcode NG17 8HP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137981).

Other contested secondary schools in Nottinghamshire

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.