School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bartholomew School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 12 families who named Bartholomew School as their first choice did not get a place: 202 put it first and 190 of them were offered one.

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

12

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

202 first preferences for 207 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bartholomew School

There is no published appeal success rate for Bartholomew 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 Oxfordshire 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 Oxfordshire, 43% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 238 of 553 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 Oxfordshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Oxfordshire 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

Bartholomew School turned first-choice families away in 7 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 Bartholomew 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 1.01 per place 209 first choices 206 places 2016/17 0.96 per place 199 first choices 208 places 2017/18 1.05 per place 219 first choices 208 places 2018/19 1.27 per place 265 first choices 209 places 2019/20 1 per place 208 first choices 209 places 2020/21 0.95 per place 203 first choices 214 places 2021/22 1.09 per place 231 first choices 212 places 2022/23 1.14 per place 241 first choices 212 places 2023/24 1.05 per place 218 first choices 207 places 2024/25 1.18 per place 245 first choices 208 places 2025/26 0.92 per place 197 first choices 213 places 2026/27 0.98 per place 202 first choices 207 places
First preferences per place at Bartholomew School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 202 first preferences for 207 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bartholomew School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 206 209 196 1.01
2016/17 208 199 195 0.96
2017/18 208 219 199 1.05
2018/19 209 265 206 1.27
2019/20 209 208 197 1
2020/21 214 203 196 0.95
2021/22 212 231 204 1.09
2022/23 212 241 212 1.14
2023/24 207 218 196 1.05
2024/25 208 245 199 1.18
2025/26 213 197 195 0.92
2026/27 207 202 190 0.98

Places offered

207

in 2026/27

Named first choice

202

556 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

94.1%

190 of 202

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 207 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Bartholomew 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 Bartholomew 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 Children We Care For (CWCF) and children who were previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to adoption, a child arrangements order, or special guardianship order. A looked after child is a child who is in the care of a local authority in England or is being provided with accommodation by a local authority in England in the exercise of their social services functions.
2 Children who appear to the Bartholomew School admissions authority to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted. A child is regarded as having been in state care in a place outside of England if they were accommodated by a public authority, a religious organisation or any other provider of care whose sole purpose is to benefit society. 3) Disabled children who need to be admitted to a school on the grounds of physical accessibility. The definition of disability is that contained within the Equality Act 2010.
3 Children of staff at Bartholomew school where:
a) the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, or
b) the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage.
4 Children who live in the school’s designated (catchment) area. If there are more applicants than places in this category, priority will be given in the following order:
a) First priority in category 5 will go to those children who are on the roll of one of the Eynsham Partnership Academy (EPA) primary schools and live in the designated area of Bartholomew School. However, if there are more applicants than places in this category, priority will be given, within this group, to those children who have a brother or sister on roll already at Bartholomew at the time of application, followed by those who live closest to the school using the shortest designated public route as defined on the Directorate for Children, Education & Families’ Geographic Information System.
b) Second priority in category 5 will go to those children who have a brother or sister on roll already at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry. However, if there are more applicants than places, priority will be given to those children who live closest to the school using the shortest designated public route as defined on the Directorate for Children, Education & Families’ Geographic Information System.
c) Third priority in category 5 will go to those children who live closest to the school by the shortest designated public route as defined on the Directorate for Children, Education & Families’ Geographic Information System.
5 Children who live outside the school’s designated (catchment) area. If there are more applicants than places in this category, priority will be given in the following order:
a) First priority in category 6 will go to those children who will have a brother or sister on roll at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry. If there are more applicants than places in this category, priority will be given, within this group, to children who live closest to the school by the shortest designated public route as defined on the Directorate for Children, Education & Families’ Geographic Information System.
b) Second priority in category 6 will go to those children who are on the roll of one of the Eynsham Partnership Academy (EPA) primary schools. However, if there are more applicants than places in this category, priority will be given, within this group, to those children who live closest to the school using the shortest designated public route as defined on the Directorate for Children, Education & Families’ Geographic Information System.
6 Those children who live closest to the school by the shortest designated public route as defined on the Directorate for Children, Education & Families’ Geographic Information System. 5. Twins and Children from Multiple Births Where the parent has made the same preferences of school and through the normal operation of the admission arrangements the last available place at a school has been allocated to one twin, or child from a multiple birth, the other twin, or the other children from the multiple birth, will be offered a place at that school. This means that in these circumstances the Published Admission Number would be exceeded.
7 Admission of a Child outside Their Normal Age Group Parents may request that their child is admitted outside their normal age group. When such a request is made, the school will make a decision on the basis of the circumstances of the case and in the best interests of the child concerned, taking into account the views of the Headteacher and any supporting evidence provided by the parent. This will include:
• Taking account of the parent’s views; and
• Any information about the child’s academic, social and emotional development; and
• Where relevant, their medical history and the views of a medical professional; and
• Whether they have previously been educated out of their normal age group; and
• Whether they

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.

Bartholomew 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

1,145

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,067

93.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

78

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

250

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 Bartholomew 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 Bartholomew School reported 78 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 93.2% 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 Bartholomew School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,079 places 1,052 on roll 2012/13 1,079 places 1,070 on roll 2013/14 1,079 places 1,075 on roll 2014/15 1,079 places 1,141 on roll 2015/16 1,250 places 1,168 on roll 2016/17 1,300 places 1,227 on roll 2017/18 1,300 places 1,252 on roll 2018/19 1,300 places 1,274 on roll 2020/21 1,300 places 1,288 on roll 2021/22 1,300 places 1,324 on roll 2022/23 1,300 places 1,357 on roll 2023/24 1,300 places 1,352 on roll 2024/25 1,395 places 1,372 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
Oxfordshire

Postcode OX29 4AP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137919).

Other contested secondary schools in Oxfordshire

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.