School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at North Chadderton School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 51 families who named North Chadderton School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 262 and 288 put it first.

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

1.10

first choices for every place available

288 first preferences for 262 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at North Chadderton School

There is no published appeal success rate for North Chadderton 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 Oldham 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 Oldham, 10% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 74 of 740 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 Oldham.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Oldham 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

North Chadderton School turned first-choice families away in 11 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 North Chadderton 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 1.53 per place 351 first choices 230 places 2016/17 1.45 per place 339 first choices 234 places 2017/18 1.18 per place 315 first choices 267 places 2018/19 1.26 per place 337 first choices 267 places 2019/20 1.17 per place 311 first choices 266 places 2020/21 1.06 per place 283 first choices 266 places 2021/22 1.23 per place 330 first choices 268 places 2022/23 1.13 per place 301 first choices 266 places 2023/24 1.09 per place 289 first choices 265 places 2024/25 1.16 per place 308 first choices 266 places 2025/26 0.84 per place 220 first choices 262 places 2026/27 1.1 per place 288 first choices 262 places
First preferences per place at North Chadderton School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 288 first preferences for 262 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at North Chadderton School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 230 351 219 1.53
2016/17 234 339 229 1.45
2017/18 267 315 236 1.18
2018/19 267 337 254 1.26
2019/20 266 311 255 1.17
2020/21 266 283 243 1.06
2021/22 268 330 250 1.23
2022/23 266 301 246 1.13
2023/24 265 289 246 1.09
2024/25 266 308 255 1.16
2025/26 262 220 217 0.84
2026/27 262 288 237 1.1

Places offered

262

in 2026/27

Named first choice

288

779 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.3%

237 of 288

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 262 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria North Chadderton School published for 2027 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 North Chadderton School, 2027 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 Children who are in public care or children who have previously been looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, residence, or special guardianship order.
2 Those children who are considered to have an exceptional medical or social reason as to why they should attend a particular school (Parents/carers will need to submit a case supported by appropriate professional evidence from a doctor, social worker or similar professional that sets out the particular reasons why this school is the most suitable and the difficulties that could be caused if the child were to attend another school. The evidence must not be more than six months older than the application date). Criterion 2 Children living within the prescribed geographical priority area who have a sibling attending the school in Year 7 to 13 when the child is admitted. […] 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 2027 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.

North Chadderton School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

1,345

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,350

100.4% of capacity

Over its capacity by

5

reported as full or beyond

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 North Chadderton 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 North Chadderton 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 North Chadderton School from 2014/15 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2014/15 1,504 places 1,454 on roll 2015/16 1,504 places 1,434 on roll 2016/17 1,504 places 1,408 on roll 2017/18 1,504 places 1,430 on roll 2018/19 1,530 places 1,488 on roll 2020/21 1,645 places 1,564 on roll 2021/22 1,645 places 1,571 on roll 2022/23 1,645 places 1,596 on roll 2023/24 1,645 places 1,566 on roll 2024/25 1,645 places 1,551 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
Oldham

Postcode OL9 0BN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 141248).

Other contested secondary schools in Oldham

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.