Appealing for more than one school

Why you are holding several refusals at once

Worth thirty seconds, because it tells you which schools you can appeal for and some families get that wrong before they start.

Paragraph 2.12(a) of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires that only one offer per child is made by the local authority, and paragraph 2.11 of the same Code requires that where a place is available for a child at more than one school, the home local authority ensures so far as is reasonably practicable that the child is offered a place at whichever of those schools is their highest preference. So the system considers every school you named, and then gives you exactly one place — the best available one on your own ranking.

The schools you ranked above the one you were offered are the ones that refused you. Each of those is a separate decision to refuse admission, and each carries its own right of appeal. The schools you ranked below the offer did not refuse you; they were simply never reached, and there is no refusal there to appeal against.

Every one of those refusals has to be notified properly. Paragraph 2.5 of the Appeals Code requires that when you are informed of a decision to refuse your child a place, you are given the reason admission was refused, information about the right to appeal, the deadline for lodging an appeal and the contact details for making one — and the same paragraph says admission authorities must not limit the grounds on which an appeal can be made. Paragraph 2.32 of the Admissions Code imposes the same duty from the other side. If the letter covering one of your refusals does not tell you those four things, ask for them in writing; that is a duty rather than a favour, and the deadline is running.

Paragraph 5.1 is about the same school, and this is the other one

This is the paragraph a family will find first, usually quoted out of context, and it reads at a glance like a rule against what you are trying to do. It is not.

Read the words that limit it. What 5.1 removes is a second appeal for the same school in the same academic year. An appeal for a different school is none of those things. Two appeals for two different schools are not one appeal and a second appeal — they are two first appeals, arising from two separate refusals, heard by two panels against two different schools' cases.

Nothing in the Appeals Code or the Admissions Code sets a maximum number of appeals, makes one appeal count against another, or requires you to choose. The limit on how many you bring is practical rather than legal, and the rest of this page is about that limit.

What 5.1 does bar, and why the exception is narrower than the version circulating online: After the decision

Different schools, different bodies, different dates

This is the section that costs families an appeal, and it is entirely administrative. Paragraph 1.1 of the Appeals Code puts responsibility for making arrangements for appeals against the refusal of a school place on the admission authority of the school, and the first sentence of paragraph 2.11 says the same thing again: responsibility rests with the admission authority of the school in question.

So there is no such thing as "my appeal" in the singular when two schools refused you. There is your appeal to one body and your appeal to another, and which body depends on what kind of school each one is.

Two schools on different rows means two organisations running two processes. Each publishes its own appeals timetable — paragraph 2.2 requires admission authorities to publish theirs on their website by 28 February each year — and each sets its own deadline for lodging within that timetable. Paragraph 2.1(a) is a floor rather than a date: the timetable must allow you at least 20 school days from the date on your refusal letter. Two authorities working from the same floor routinely land on different days.

The knock-on runs through the whole calendar. Paragraph 2.3(a) requires appeals in the normal admissions round to be heard within 40 school days of the deadline for lodging appeals — but that deadline is each authority's own, so two schools with different lodging deadlines have different hearing windows. Being heard for one school in May and another in July is entirely normal and means nothing about either case. You are owed at least 10 school days' notice of the hearing for each of them separately under paragraph 2.7, and a decision within 5 school days of the hearing, wherever possible after each under paragraph 2.1(d).

One arrangement makes this simpler and is worth asking about: paragraph 1.3 allows two or more admission authorities in the same local authority area to make joint arrangements for hearing appeals. Where that is in place your two appeals may be clerked and scheduled together, which removes most of the calendar problem. It also makes the overlap in the next section more likely, so it is worth knowing which you are in.

How school days are counted, what each of these deadlines is, and what happens if you miss one: Appeal deadlines and the timetable

Each appeal is heard on its own, and the Code stops short of the rest

Each of your appeals is a separate hearing before a panel constituted under section 1 of the Appeals Code: appointed by the admission authority or the clerk acting for it, a chair and at least two other members, including at least one lay member and at least one person with experience in education, acquainted with educational conditions in the area, or a parent of registered pupils (paragraph 1.5). Panel members must be independent and must retain that independence for the duration of their service (1.6), and paragraph 1.7 disqualifies anyone with a connection to the authority or the school in question that might reasonably be taken to raise doubts about their ability to act impartially.

Each panel applies the two-stage test to its own school: paragraph 3.2 asks whether that school's admission arrangements complied with admissions law and were correctly and impartially applied to your child; paragraph 3.3 asks whether admitting an additional child would prejudice the provision of efficient education or the efficient use of resources at that school; and paragraph 3.8 balances that prejudice against your case. Nothing in any of those three tests has a place for another school's appeal, which is the real answer to whether appealing twice weakens either one.

Beyond that, the Code is quiet, and this page would rather say so than fill the gap with something reassuring.

The practical consequence is one line long and it is worth following even though it costs you nothing: write each statement so it would still be true if the other panel read it. Not because anyone will, but because a case you would have to keep from one panel is a case with a problem in it. If school A is essential for your child's needs and school B is also essential for different reasons, both can be true — but say what is specifically true of each rather than sending the same paragraphs twice with the name changed.

How a panel is constituted, who is disqualified from sitting, and what independence does and does not mean: Who decides your appeal

Three appeals means a third of the preparation each

Here is the part of this page that is actually worth reading, and it argues against the thing you probably came here to be told you could do.

The appeals do not run in sequence. They run on top of each other. In the normal admissions round every refusal arrives on the same offer day, so every lodging deadline falls in the same fortnight and every hearing falls in the same window under paragraph 2.3(a). Three appeals is not three months of work spread out. It is three sets of information requests, three sets of admission arrangements to read, three bundles, three sets of papers to go through when they arrive under paragraph 2.10, and three hearings, inside the same few weeks, alongside your job and the rest of your family.

And the thing being tested at each of them is specificity. Paragraph 3.8 requires the panel to take into account your reasons for expressing a preference for the school, including what that school can offer the child that the allocated or other schools cannot. Read the last three words carefully, because they are the ones that bite here. If you are appealing for three schools, the "other schools" a panel may weigh yours against include the other two you are appealing for. You therefore owe three different, true, specific answers to the same question — one per school — and a family that only has one real answer will find it does not survive being said three times.

One piece of arithmetic this page will not do for you, because it cannot be done honestly. There is no published figure for how often appealing for several schools succeeds at any of them, at any level, and anyone offering you one has made it up. The Department for Education publishes appeals by council and phase and nothing about how many schools a family appealed for. So "more shots on goal" is a feeling rather than a finding, and it assumes the three cases are as strong as the one would have been — which is the assumption the paragraph above is about.

How to decide which ones to work on

Rank your refusals against the two things a panel is permitted to act on, not against how much you want each school.

• Where is there a first-stage point? If for one of the schools you can see something that went wrong — the arrangements themselves, or how they were applied to you — that is the appeal to put the hours into. Paragraph 3.5(a) requires the panel 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 otherwise. It is the only route on which a panel has no discretion.
• Where do you have a specific second-stage answer? A named provision, a service that only one of the schools has, a documented reason this school and not another. If the honest answer for a school is that it has better results than the one you were allocated, that is the weakest form of a 3.8 case and it is being weighed against real prejudice to a full school.
• Where is the refusal on infant class size? Those appeals run under section 4 of the Appeals Code on a much narrower test, and 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 covering every such appeal heard in England and neither is a forecast about yours — but if one of your three is an infant class size refusal and the others are not, that tells you where the hours are better spent.
• Where would you be genuinely happy? Worth asking plainly. Families sometimes appeal for a third school they ranked third for a reason, and then spend a fortnight of finite preparation on it.

What a case that survives 3.8 actually looks like, and the structure to write each one in: Writing your appeal statement

Why the strongest evidence takes weeks to obtain, which is the real constraint on how many appeals you can prepare: What actually counts as evidence

If two of them are upheld

It happens, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the Code for resolving it, because each appeal is decided on its own.

Paragraph 2.25 requires panels to either uphold or dismiss an appeal and not to uphold an appeal subject to any specified conditions, and records that under section 94(6) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 a panel's decision that a child shall be admitted to a school is binding on the admission authority concerned. Concerned, singular: each decision binds its own school's admission authority and nobody else's. No panel can uphold your appeal on condition that the other one fails, and neither decision waits for the other.

So two upheld appeals give you two places your child is entitled to, one child, and a decision to make. What follows is not in either Code — no paragraph tells you how to choose or requires you to tell anyone — but it is what the situation actually needs.

• Decide quickly, and in writing. Accept one, and confirm the start date with that school.
• Release the other one straight away. Tell that admission authority in writing that you are declining the place. This is the part that matters and it is easy to leave for a week you never get to.
• Release the place you were originally allocated, which you no longer need either, and come off the waiting lists for schools you have now decided against.

Paragraph 2.15 of the Admissions Code requires each admission authority to maintain a waiting list ranked on the published oversubscription criteria and re-ranked every time a child is added. A place you hand back does not sit in a drawer — it goes to whoever the criteria put at the top of that list, and last month that was you. Two families are waiting on the two places you are holding, and the only thing standing between them and an offer is an email you have not sent.

What the decision letter has to contain, and what happens after each decision either way: After the decision

The waiting lists are the part that genuinely costs nothing

If the trade-off section talked you out of appealing for all of them, this is what you do instead, and it is free in a way the appeals are not.

Paragraph 3.21 of the Appeals Code says appeal panels must not take account of where the admission authority has placed a child on the waiting list, or of the fact that appeals have not been made in respect of other children on it, and must not make any decision relating to the placement of a child on a waiting list. The list cannot help your appeal and your appeal cannot touch your list, at either end. That is why running both costs you nothing, and dropping either one buys you nothing.

And there is no limit of one. Paragraph 2.15 of the Admissions Code requires each admission authority to maintain a clear, fair and objective waiting list for its oversubscribed school, ranked on that school's own published oversubscription criteria. They are separate lists, run by separate bodies, on separate criteria. Being on one has no effect on any other, and no admission authority is told which other lists you are on or asked to care.

So for a lot of families the sensible shape is: one appeal prepared properly, and a place on the waiting list for every school you would still take. That is one email per school, it takes an evening, and it is the part of this process that keeps working through the summer while you are not doing anything.

Two cautions, both of which cost families the list without them noticing. Nothing requires an admission authority to add you automatically, and practice varies — so ask in writing for each school by name, and ask them to confirm it. And do not decline the place you were allocated to demonstrate commitment to any of these lists; it is not one of the published criteria on any of them, and it leaves your child without a school.

How each list is ranked, why your position can go down, and when the list is honestly the better route: Waiting lists, and when they beat an appeal

Be realistic about what a second appeal changes

Across England 19.4% of appeals heard were upheld — 22,402 of 115,695 appeals heard in 2024–2026 — so roughly four in five are dismissed. That is a national figure covering every appeal heard in England. Appeal outcomes are published by council and not by school, so nobody publishes a rate for any of the schools you are appealing for, and none of this is a forecast about any of your cases. Rates vary a great deal between councils, which is worth looking at, and is still a description of what happened to other families rather than a prediction about yours.

Nobody publishes anything at all about families who appealed for more than one school, so nothing here can tell you whether two appeals is better than one for you. What can be said is what the Code makes each panel do: apply 3.2 and 3.3 to its own school, and then weigh your case against that school's prejudice under 3.8. Three appeals is three separate versions of that test, each of which needs its own specific answer, and the only input you control is how good each answer is.

Before you decide how to divide the time, read what a panel is actually permitted to act on. The grounds pages are the half that decides most appeals, and they are the fastest way to see which of your refusals has something in it and which is a preference with a school attached.

The one ground where a panel has no discretion, and the first thing to check for each school: A mistake in how the decision was made

If any of your refusals was made on infant class size grounds, that one is judged on a much narrower test: Infant class size

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. The Appeals Code's defined term "multiple appeals" (2.21) means several appeals for the same school and is not what this page is about; no paragraph governing it is used here to support anything about appealing for several different schools. Where this page says the Code does not address something — what one panel is told of another, whether members may overlap, whether hearings are arranged to avoid clashing — that is a statement about the Code's contents and not a claim about what admission authorities do in practice. Appeal statistics are Department for Education figures used under the Open Government Licence — 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.
• What actually counts as evidence The difference between a letter that moves a panel and one that does not is almost always who wrote it. What to gather, what to leave out, and why the strongest evidence is written by somebody other than you.
• 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.
• 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.