What actually counts as evidence

Neither Code contains rules of evidence — and that is the point

It is worth being straight about this before anything else, because a lot of what is written about appeals online implies a rulebook that does not exist. The School Admission Appeals Code 2022 tells the panel what to decide and in what order. It does not tell it what to believe. There is no paragraph ranking a paediatrician above a neighbour, no admissibility test, and no exhibit rules.

What there is, instead, is a judicial function. Paragraph 1.2 says appeal panels perform a judicial function and must be transparent, accessible, independent and impartial — and a body in that position does what any such body does with an assertion it cannot check: it weighs it less than one it can. That is not a rule you can quote at anyone. It is the reason the rest of this page is arranged the way it is.

The two places where either Code does illustrate what evidence looks like are worth putting side by side, because they point the same way.

Two examples, in two different Codes, drafted for two unrelated purposes, and every item in both is a document produced by somebody other than the family. That is as close to an evidential principle as the statutory framework gets, and it is the principle this page is built on.

The hierarchy

Ranked by who wrote it and by whether it existed before the appeal did. Those are the two things a panel can assess without knowing anything about your family, which is exactly why they decide how far a document travels.

Read it as a description of how checkable material lands rather than as a rule — see the section above. Nothing in either Code sets this out, and any page that gives you a paragraph number for it is giving you one that does not exist.

The practical consequence is the one families act on last and should act on first. Before you ask anybody to write anything, ask what already exists. A folder of clinic letters in a kitchen drawer outranks the letter you are about to spend three weeks waiting for, it is free, and you can have it this afternoon. Every service that has seen your child has written something; most of it was copied to you at the time, and what was not can usually be requested.

The ground most of this evidence is gathered for: Medical and social need

Where the need is special educational needs and there is no plan: Special educational needs without an EHC plan

What makes a professional's letter carry, and what makes it a template

Most letters written for appeals are wasted in the same four ways, and all four are avoidable by telling the writer what the letter is for before they start. You are not coaching them; you are saving them from writing the wrong document.

When you make the request, give the writer three things: your child's name and date of birth, one sentence on what the letter is for, and the date you need it by. Do not send a draft for them to sign. A letter in a professional's own words that says less is worth more than a strong letter in yours with their name at the bottom, and the second kind is easier to spot than people think.

The rule that ambushes families: paragraph 2.14

This is the single most common way a prepared family arrives at a hearing with nothing. It catches people who did everything else right, and it catches them at the point where there is no time left to fix it.

Read what that does. If the head teacher, the head of year, a governor or the SENCO at the school you are appealing for offers to write in support — and they often do, kindly, meaning it — the panel is not permitted to allow it. Not "will weigh it lightly". Must not allow it. A family that builds its second-stage case on that letter has built it on something that cannot be read.

The reason is in the paragraph itself and it is not about your child. Every other family appealing for that school is being told the same thing, and a school that supported some appellants and not others would be choosing between them. If someone at the school has offered, thank them, tell them why you cannot use it, and ask them instead for something factual and published — what the provision you are relying on actually is, in the school's own words. That is prospectus material, it is available to everyone, and it is not support for your appeal.

One further point of order. Paragraph 2.12 requires the admission authority to provide a presenting officer to present the decision not to admit and to answer detailed questions about the case being heard and about the school. Where the school you are appealing for is its own admission authority, that officer may well be someone from the school — and they are there to present the refusal, not to help you. It is not a contradiction of 2.14: the same person barred from supporting your appeal is required to appear against it. Prepare questions for them rather than expecting sympathy.

How that plays out in the room: What happens at the hearing

Who to ask, and what to ask them for

Seven sources, and the order is roughly the order to work through them in. Ask everybody in the same week — none of these people is waiting for your email, and the requests do not conflict with each other.

Read the third column against your own timetable. You have at least 20 school days from the date on your refusal letter to lodge, and after that the clock stops being yours: paragraph 2.1(c) requires the admission authority's timetable to set your deadline for further evidence, and paragraph 2.7 puts that deadline in the hearing notification. What you are entitled to is at least 10 school days' notice of the hearing — a floor, not a promise of more. A consultant's letter requested in the fourth week of all that is a letter you will be asking the panel's permission to use under 2.10, if it arrives at all.

Two habits make the difference between a list of requests and a bundle. Put every request in writing, even where you have already asked in person, so you can say at the hearing what you asked for and when. And chase once, politely, at the halfway point rather than at the end — a letter that has not been started three days before your deadline is a letter that is not coming, and knowing that in time lets you write the case you actually have.

What the evidence has to be about

A bundle can be entirely genuine, entirely written by other people, and still only half an argument. Paragraph 3.8 is precise about what the second stage is weighing:

That sentence has two halves, and almost every bundle contains only the first. The clinician's letter establishes the need. It says nothing about which school meets it — and it usually cannot, because a paediatrician has no view on your local secondaries and would be stepping outside their knowledge if they claimed one. So the comparison, which is the half the Code actually names, has to come from somewhere else.

In practice it comes from three places, and none of them requires anyone's goodwill:

• The school's own published material. A named unit, a programme, a nurture provision, a language taken to A level, a specialist facility — quoted from the prospectus or the website, with the wording as published. This is not support for your appeal and 2.14 does not reach it.
• The allocated school's published material, or its own confirmation that it does not offer the same thing. A factual gap, not a judgement about quality. "The allocated school does not run X" is a fact; "the allocated school is not a good school" is an opinion, and the second one makes a panel read everything else in the document as one too.
• You, joining the two. One paragraph in your own statement: here is the need the letter evidences, here is the named provision at this school, here is why the second answers the first. That paragraph is yours to write and nobody else can write it.

Be honest with yourself about the join before you spend three weeks collecting the need. A letter establishing that your child has severe anxiety is real evidence of something the panel is not being asked to decide, unless it connects to something this school has and the allocated one does not. Where that connection genuinely exists — a sibling already in the building, a member of staff who has worked with your child, a journey that is manageable one way and not the other — the evidence to gather is the evidence of the connection, and it is often easier to get than the medical letter.

How to structure that in the statement, what to attach and how to number it: Writing your appeal statement

First-stage evidence is a different kind of thing entirely

Everything above is about the second stage — your child, weighed against harm to a school. The first stage is not about your child at all, and it runs on documents rather than on letters.

Paragraph 3.2 has the panel consider whether the admission arrangements complied with the mandatory requirements of the School Admissions Code and Part 3 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, and whether they were correctly and impartially applied in the case in question. The evidence for that is dates, forms, records and published wording — the determined arrangements for your entry year, your application with its receipt date, the criterion you were placed in, the last distance offered. No amount of it is written by a clinician and none of it needs anyone to agree to help you.

Two things make this the better place to spend a week, where there is anything in it at all. It is the only stage where the panel has no discretion — paragraph 3.5(a) requires it to uphold the appeal where the arrangements did not comply or were not correctly and impartially applied and your child would have been offered a place if they had been. And the material is held rather than created: paragraph 2.7 of the Admissions Code requires the admission authority to keep a clear record of any decisions on applications, and paragraph 2.8 of the Appeals Code requires it to comply with reasonable requests from parents for information they need to help prepare their case for appeal.

Which makes first-stage evidence the one category on this page that is requested rather than gathered, and it has its own guide.

What to request, from whom, and why asking late buys documents you can no longer use: Getting the information you need

What a point built on those documents looks like: A mistake in how the decision was made

Evidence aimed at something the panel must ignore

Different from weak evidence, and worth separating. A weak exhibit is read and given little weight. These are read and can be given none, because the Code puts the thing they are aimed at outside the panel's reach — so the week spent assembling them is not a poor investment, it is a total one.

The waiting list row is the one to be careful with, because leaving it out of the bundle is not the same as ignoring the list. Paragraph 3.21 stops the panel taking account of your position on it; it does not stop the list working, and paragraph 2.15 of the Admissions Code requires a clear, fair and objective list maintained until at least 31 December of the school year of admission, ranked by the published oversubscription criteria with no priority for how long a child has been on it. Stay on it, keep it out of the document the panel has to read.

In detail: Waiting lists, and when they beat an appeal

Nothing in the bundle is private

This surprises people, and it is better to know it before you decide what to send than afterwards.

Paragraph 2.24 requires appeal panels to operate according to the principles of natural justice, and names the one that matters here: paragraph 2.24(c), written material and evidence must have been seen by all the parties. Paragraph 2.10 is how that happens in practice — the clerk must send all the papers required for the hearing, including the names of the panel members, to both the parties and the members of the panel a reasonable time before the date of the hearing.

So your child's diagnosis, the CAMHS letter, the social worker's involvement and anything you wrote about your family goes to the presenting officer, who may well work at the school you are appealing for. There is no confidential channel to the panel and no way to put something in front of three panel members and not the fourth person in the room.

That cuts both ways, and the protective half is real: it is the same principle that guarantees you see the admission authority's case — the reasons for refusing your child and its explanation of how admitting another would cause prejudice, which paragraph 2.9 requires it to give the clerk — in time to answer it. A rule that let them file evidence you never saw would be much worse for you than this one is.

Three practical consequences, none of which requires you to hold anything back that matters:

• Send the relevant part, not the whole file. Nothing requires you to attach an entire clinic record when one letter makes the point. A shorter bundle is also a bundle that gets read.
• Ask your child before you write about them, particularly a secondary-age child, and especially where the material is about mental health. They may have a view about who reads it, and where the appeal is for a sixth form place, paragraph 2.6 gives the young person the same right of appeal as their parents, so it may be their document rather than yours.
• Write nothing you would not say in front of the school. Not because criticism is barred, but because you will be sitting across from the person who read it, and a sentence written in the worst week of the process reads differently in a room in June.

Hearings themselves are held in private under paragraph 2.18 — but "private" there means the public is not admitted, not that the other party is absent. The same paragraph requires hearings to be conducted in the presence of all panel members and parties, and one party must not be left alone with the panel in the absence of the other.

Witnesses, and why a letter is usually what you will get

You can bring people. Paragraph 2.13 says appellants may be represented or accompanied by a friend, and paragraph 2.7 requires the admission authority to ask whether you intend to call any witnesses or be represented at the hearing — which is a question that arrives with the hearing notification, so the decision is made early rather than on the day.

In practice, almost no clinician, social worker or teacher will attend an appeal hearing. They are working, the hearing is on a weekday, and the slot is short. What you will get is a letter, which is why the rest of this page is about letters. Ask anyway if there is someone whose direct account would carry — a support worker who sees your child weekly is a different proposition from a consultant seen twice a year — but plan the bundle on the assumption that the paper is what turns up.

Whoever you bring, tell the clerk in advance when you are asked. Turning up with an unannounced witness is a request the panel has to deal with before it can hear anything, and it starts your appeal with an interruption instead of an argument.

If your refusal letter says infant class size

Then most of this page does not apply to you, and it is better to hear that now than after three weeks of chasing letters.

Paragraph 4.2 sends a refusal made on the ground that admitting your child would breach the infant class size limit to a separate and much narrower process. Paragraph 4.4 requires the panel to consider four matters: whether admitting an additional child would breach the limit; whether the arrangements complied with the mandatory requirements of the School Admissions Code and Part 3 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998; whether they were correctly and impartially applied; and whether the decision to refuse admission was one which a reasonable admission authority would have made in the circumstances of the case. Paragraph 4.6 then permits the panel to uphold the appeal at the first stage on three grounds only — that admission would not breach the limit, that the arrangements did not comply or were not correctly and impartially applied and the child would have been offered a place if they had, or that the refusal was not a decision a reasonable admission authority would have made.

Your child's needs are not on either list. The clinician's letter, the CAMHS correspondence, the SENCO's account of what your child needs — the material this whole page is about — has no door into an infant class size decision at the first stage. And the first stage is the only way to the second: paragraph 4.7 reaches the comparison at 4.9 only where a number of children would have been offered a place under 4.6 and admitting them all would seriously prejudice the provision of efficient education or efficient use of resources. If nobody gets through 4.6, there is nothing to compare.

The one route where evidence still does something is the reasonableness limb, and paragraph 4.10 is blunt about the height of it: the threshold is high, and the panel needs to be satisfied the decision was perverse in the light of the admission arrangements — beyond the range of responses open to a reasonable decision maker, or so outrageous in its defiance of logic or accepted moral standards that no sensible person who applied their mind to the question could have arrived at it. That is not a test a strong medical letter meets. It is a test about the decision, not about the child.

The figures say the same thing from the other direction. Across England 9.4% of infant class size appeals heard were upheld — 1,500 of 15,927 appeals heard in 2024–2026 — against 19.4% across all appeals, 22,402 of 115,695 appeals heard in 2024–2026. Both are national figures for every such appeal heard in England; nobody publishes an appeal rate for an individual school, so neither is a forecast about yours.

Check the reason on your letter carefully before you accept this applies to you: paragraph 4.2 is explicit that a refusal in an infant class for any reason other than the class size limit is decided under the ordinary two-stage process in section 3, which is the better test to be judged under and the one the rest of this page describes.

The three grounds in full, and how to tell which you are in: Infant class size

Most families cannot get strong evidence

Everything above describes what a good bundle looks like, and it would be dishonest to leave it there, because the ordinary refused family does not have one and cannot assemble one. A healthy child, no clinician, no caseworker, no SENCO involvement, nobody with a professional reason to write anything at all — that is not an unusual case, it is the common one. There is no document that turns it into the other kind.

If that is you, the useful thing is to stop looking for evidence you do not have and change what you spend the week on.

• Do not manufacture volume. Four letters from relatives saying what you have already said is your account counted four times, and a panel reading a stack of appeals for one school (2.21) recognises padding faster than almost anything else. It also makes the one genuine thing in the bundle harder to find.
• Make a thin second-stage case short. Half a page, in your own words, saying plainly what you want and why — with nothing attached — reads as honest. The same case at four pages reads as somebody hoping length will do the work, and it is the version a panel finishes with less regard for than it started.
• Spend the time on the first stage instead. That evidence is requested, not gathered; it does not depend on anyone agreeing to help you; and it is aimed at the only stage where the panel has no discretion (3.5(a)). Most families never look, which is why it is the half most often left on the table.
• Lodge anyway. An appeal costs nothing but the time, and paragraph 3.4 requires the panel, in all cases, to refer to the local authority — and to the admission authority where the school is its own — any aspects of the admission arrangements that do not comply with admissions law. A defect you turn up gets referred on even in an appeal you lose.

And the honest arithmetic, because this page would otherwise imply that good evidence buys an outcome. Across England 19.4% of appeals heard were upheld — 22,402 of 115,695 appeals heard in 2024–2026 — so four in five are dismissed. Most of those were always going to be: the school was genuinely full, the arrangements were applied correctly, and the family's reasons for preferring it, however real, did not outweigh the prejudice at 3.8. Nothing on this page changes that, and no figure exists that would show it did — appeal outcomes are published by council, not by school and not by what was in the bundle. Rates vary a great deal between councils and the figures for yours are here, but nobody publishes a rate for an individual school, so treat all of it as a description of what happened to other families rather than a forecast about yours.

What evidence does do is narrower and worth the week where it exists. A panel can only weigh what it can check, and the difference between an asserted need and a recorded one is the difference between a paragraph it has to take on trust and a fact it can act on under 3.8. If you have that material, get it in on time. If you do not, say so plainly and spend the time where the discretion runs out — and before you decide which of those you are in, read the grounds pages, because what a panel is permitted to act on decides more appeals than what you send it.

Every date in the process, and how school days are counted: Appeal deadlines and the timetable

Paragraph numbers on this page are from the School Admission Appeals Code 2022 unless the page says "Admissions Code", in which case they are from the School Admissions Code 2021. Where this page says a panel or an admission authority "must" or "must not" do something, the Code uses those words too. The four-tier hierarchy is not from either Code and is described on the page as what it is — an account of how a judicial body weighs material it can and cannot verify. The timings in the "who to ask" table are planning figures rather than entitlements: nothing in either Code sets a period in which a third party must reply to a parent. Appeal statistics are Department for Education figures — how we source and calculate them.

The rest of the process

• How a school appeal works, start to finish The whole process in order: what the refusal letter has to tell you, who hears the appeal, what the two stages are, and what the panel can and cannot do at the end of it.
• Appeal deadlines and the timetable Twenty school days to lodge, ten days' notice of the hearing, forty days to be heard in the normal round and thirty in-year. What is fixed by the Code, what each council sets for itself, and what happens if you miss it.
• Getting the information you need The admission authority must meet reasonable requests for the information you need to prepare. What to ask for, when to ask, and the handful of documents that decide most first-stage arguments.
• Writing your appeal statement How to structure a written case so the panel can find the two things it is required to decide. Most statements are an account of how much the family wants the school, which is the one thing that carries no weight.
• Who decides your appeal The panel is independent of the school and the council, constituted under the Code, and its decision binds the admission authority. Who sits on it, who is disqualified from sitting, and what independence does and does not mean.
• What happens at the hearing The running order, who speaks when, what you will be asked, and what to do about the questions parents are routinely thrown by. Hearings are shorter and less formal than almost everyone expects.
• Appealing for more than one school Every school that refused you carries its own right of appeal, and paragraph 5.1 bars a second appeal only for the same school. Each runs on its own admission authority's timetable — and a thin case for three schools is usually worse than a strong case for one.
• Waiting lists, and when they beat an appeal A waiting list must be ranked by the published oversubscription criteria, not by when you joined it, and must run to at least 31 December. For a lot of families this is the better of the two routes, and it needs no hearing.
• After the decision The decision letter has to show the panel's working, and there is no second appeal for the same school in the same academic year — the one exception is narrower than the version circulating online. What a complaint can reach, and why the waiting list is now the live route.