School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Birinus School?

In 2026/27, St Birinus School offered 235 places and 196 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.83

first choices for every place available

196 first preferences for 235 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Birinus School

There is no published appeal success rate for St Birinus 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

St Birinus School turned first-choice families away in 1 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 St Birinus 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 0.95 per place 205 first choices 215 places 2016/17 0.92 per place 170 first choices 185 places 2017/18 0.87 per place 149 first choices 171 places 2018/19 0.91 per place 127 first choices 140 places 2019/20 0.85 per place 150 first choices 177 places 2020/21 0.94 per place 166 first choices 177 places 2021/22 1 per place 177 first choices 177 places 2022/23 0.98 per place 227 first choices 231 places 2023/24 0.94 per place 245 first choices 262 places 2024/25 1.23 per place 282 first choices 230 places 2025/26 0.9 per place 210 first choices 234 places 2026/27 0.83 per place 196 first choices 235 places
First preferences per place at St Birinus School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 196 first preferences for 235 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Birinus School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 215 205 205 0.95
2016/17 185 170 170 0.92
2017/18 171 149 149 0.87
2018/19 140 127 127 0.91
2019/20 177 150 150 0.85
2020/21 177 166 166 0.94
2021/22 177 177 167 1
2022/23 231 227 227 0.98
2023/24 262 245 245 0.94
2024/25 230 282 222 1.23
2025/26 234 210 210 0.9
2026/27 235 196 196 0.83

Places offered

235

in 2026/27

Named first choice

196

341 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

196 of 196

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 231 offers

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

1,221

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,054

86.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

167

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

228

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 Birinus 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 Birinus School reported 167 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 86.3% 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 St Birinus School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,467 places 1,119 on roll 2013/14 1,575 places 1,077 on roll 2014/15 1,467 places 1,074 on roll 2015/16 1,467 places 1,018 on roll 2016/17 1,467 places 984 on roll 2017/18 1,467 places 903 on roll 2018/19 1,467 places 850 on roll 2020/21 1,428 places 925 on roll 2021/22 1,428 places 929 on roll 2022/23 1,428 places 1,046 on roll 2023/24 1,428 places 1,158 on roll 2024/25 1,449 places 1,205 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 OX11 8AZ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138762).

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.