Who decides your appeal

What an appeal panel actually is

Start with the sentence that sets the register for everything else. Paragraph 1.2 of the Appeals Code: appeal panels perform a judicial function and must be transparent, accessible, independent, impartial, and operate according to principles of natural justice.

That is not the description of an internal review of a council decision. A panel is not checking whether the admissions team followed its own procedure to somebody's satisfaction — it is deciding a question, on evidence, between two parties, and it can order an outcome the admission authority does not want. What follows in the Code is the machinery that makes that possible, and it is worth a page because the machinery is the only reason the decision is worth anything.

Paragraph 1.1 puts the responsibility for making arrangements for appeals on the admission authority of the school, under section 94 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, and requires both the admission authority and the panel to act in accordance with this Code, the School Admissions (Appeal Arrangements) (England) Regulations 2012, the School Admissions Code, other law relating to admissions, and relevant human rights and equalities legislation.

So the body that refused your child is the body that arranges the appeal against the refusal. Families who notice this usually assume it is a loophole. It is not — it is the fact the whole of section 1 is written to contain, and the containment is specific: the admission authority appoints the panel and pays for it, and is then told in detail who it may not appoint, what independence it must ensure, and what happens to a panel that loses a member. Paragraph 1.3 also allows two or more admission authorities in the same local authority area to make joint arrangements for hearing appeals, which is why your hearing may be run by a service covering several schools.

Three people, at least, and two of them have to be different kinds of people

Paragraph 1.5 requires the admission authority — or the clerk acting on its behalf — to appoint an independent appeal panel comprising a chair and at least two other panel members. A panel must consist of the following, with at least one from each category:

• Lay people — which the Code defines as someone without personal experience in the management of any school or the provision of education in any school, except as a school governor or in another voluntary capacity (1.5(a)).
• People with experience in education, who are acquainted with educational conditions in the local authority area, or who are parents of registered pupils at school (1.5(b)).

The composition is doing something deliberate. One member is required not to be an insider, so the panel contains somebody who will not accept a school's account of its own capacity as self-evident. Another is required to know how schools actually work, so the panel is not persuaded by an argument that sounds good and could not happen. Between them they are the audience your case is written for, and it is worth knowing that both are in the room.

Note the practical consequence of 1.5(b): the member with education experience may be a serving teacher, or simply a parent of school-age children. Neither of those is a defect, and neither is a reason to object.

Paragraph 1.12 makes the chair responsible for the conduct of the hearing — introducing the parties, explaining the roles of the clerk and the panel, explaining how the hearing will be conducted, and ensuring the parties have sufficient opportunity to state their case and ask questions. The chair is a panel member with a job, not a judge with two assistants; under paragraph 2.26 they hold a second or casting vote only where the votes are equally divided.

Everyone who will be in the room, the running order, and what you will be asked: What happens at the hearing

Independence, and who is disqualified from sitting

Paragraph 1.6 requires admission authorities to ensure that panel members are independent and retain their independence for the duration of their service. It is a continuing obligation rather than a check done once at appointment, which matters where a member's circumstances change part-way through a season of hearings.

Underneath that sits a hard list. Paragraph 1.7 records that the School Admissions (Appeal Arrangements) (England) Regulations 2012 disqualify certain people from membership of an appeal panel, and that the clerk must not allow a disqualified person to be a member of a panel. That duty is on the clerk, not on you — but the names come to you under 2.10 for a reason, and clerks are working from what they have been told.

Two of those are worth sitting with. 1.7(d) is the limb that catches what a list of categories cannot: any connection, present or past, with the authority, the school or one of its employees, which might reasonably be taken to raise doubts about the person's ability to act impartially. It is written as an appearance test rather than a proof test, which is the ordinary way judicial independence is protected — you are not required to show that anybody was actually biased, and you would almost never be able to.

1.7(e) is the limb almost nobody knows about: a person who has not attended the training required by the admission authority arranging the panel is disqualified from membership. Training is dealt with properly in the next section, and the reason it belongs on this page rather than in a footnote is that 1.7(e) makes it a question about whether the panel was lawfully constituted at all.

Alongside the constitution rules, paragraph 2.24(a) requires as a principle of natural justice that members of the panel must not have a vested interest in the outcome, or any involvement in an earlier stage, of the proceedings. Read 1.7, 1.8 and 2.24(a) as the same idea approached three times: nobody decides a case they have already touched.

One thing that is not a defect in independence, because families raise it and it goes nowhere. Panel members are ordinary people who are not paid a salary for it. Paragraph 1.15 makes them eligible for travel and subsistence allowances and allows compensation for loss of earnings or expenses necessarily incurred — the Code's own example is child minding costs. The rate of payment for community and voluntary controlled schools is set by the local authority; for voluntary aided and foundation schools and academies the Code says it should be set by the governing body or academy trust with regard to the rate the local authority sets. Paragraph 1.14 requires local authorities to allocate reasonable funds to governing bodies of maintained schools that are their own admission authority to meet appeal costs, including training. The money comes from the admission authority's side. That is how the Code arranges it, it is not a secret, and it is not an argument.

Training is a requirement, and it is more demanding than you would guess

Paragraph 1.10 opens with a prohibition rather than an aspiration: panel members and clerks must not take part in hearings until they have received appropriate training. Admission authorities must arrange and fund up-to-date training for appeal panel members on any aspect felt to be relevant to the functioning of the panel — and then the Code sets a floor. As a minimum, this must include:

• The law relating to admissions
• Their duties under the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010
• Procedural fairness and natural justice
• The roles of particular panel members — the Code's own example is chairing skills

The minimum training syllabus at paragraph 1.10.

Look at what that list actually asks of a volunteer. Not "an overview of the appeals process" — the law relating to admissions, duties under two named Acts, and the principles of procedural fairness and natural justice that paragraph 2.24 then requires them to operate by. The people deciding your appeal are required to have been trained in the same body of law your case is built on.

And the responsibility for it is placed somewhere specific. The last sentence of 1.10 makes it the responsibility of the clerk to ensure that all panel members have received any training necessary to enable them to fulfil their role. Not the panel's, not the school's. The clerk's.

Put 1.10 next to 1.7(e) and the two become one rule. Training is required before anyone takes part in a hearing; a person who has not attended the training the admission authority required is disqualified from membership; and it is the clerk's job to make sure that has not happened. It is reasonable to ask the clerk, before the hearing, to confirm that the panel hearing your appeal has received the training required under paragraph 1.10. It is a duty on them rather than a favour to you, and it costs an email.

The clerk is not the school's, and is not on the panel either

This is the role families get wrong most often, and getting it wrong is expensive: it makes people guarded with the only person in the process required to give them independent advice, and unprepared for the person who is genuinely there to argue against them.

Independent of the school and of the education functions of the council. Not a neutral-sounding description — a requirement, in the same paragraph that requires them to know admissions law well enough to advise a panel performing a judicial function.

Paragraph 1.11 then sets out the job, and it is worth reading as a list of things you are entitled to expect. The clerk must provide an independent and impartial service. Wherever possible, an appeal panel should have the same clerk for all appeals for a particular year group at a particular school. Beyond the training duty in 1.10, the clerk's role is:

• to make the necessary administrative arrangements for hearings, unless a separate appeals administrator is appointed;
• to notify the parties of the order of proceedings in advance of the hearing — so if you do not know what order things will happen in, that is something you are owed rather than something to guess at;
• to respond to queries from appellants in advance of the hearing, or to identify the appropriate person to provide a response;
• to be an independent source of advice, or to seek appropriate advice, on procedure and on admissions law;
• to keep an accurate record of proceedings;
• and to provide the parties with written notification of the panel's decision.

Three of those are about you rather than about the panel. The clerk answers your questions before the hearing, tells you the order of proceedings, and is an independent source of advice on procedure and admissions law — to both sides, because that is what independent means. Families who assume the clerk is the school's write to nobody, arrive not knowing the order, and ask the panel a procedural question in the one hour they had for their own case.

Two limits, so the point is not oversold. The clerk advises on procedure and admissions law — not on whether your case is any good, what evidence to file, or how to argue it. And the clerk does not decide anything: paragraph 1.5 constitutes the panel as a chair and at least two other members, and the clerk is not one of them. The clerk does not vote.

What you can require the admission authority to give you before the hearing, and how to ask for it: Getting the information you need

What the panel can actually weigh, which is the thing the clerk cannot advise you on: What actually counts as evidence

If the panel loses a member part-way through

Rare, and worth a section because when it happens families are told the wrong thing about it and it is the one part of section 1 with a visible consequence.

Read the three sentences separately, because they do three different things. The hearing is postponed rather than continued — a panel of three that becomes a panel of two does not carry on. If the member cannot come back, the fix is not to appoint a replacement and resume from where the hearing stopped: a replacement is appointed and everything starts again. And the last sentence closes the obvious gap, which is the appeal that was half-heard when the member withdrew. That one is reheard too.

If your appeal is affected, the delay is genuinely irritating and it is also the protection working. A member who did not hear the first half of your case cannot decide it, and a rehearing is the only way to fix that. What is worth watching for is the shortcut: being told the hearing will continue with two members, or that your part-heard appeal will be picked up where it left off by somebody who was not there. Neither is what 1.9 says, and the clerk is the person to raise it with, before the hearing resumes rather than after.

One thing 1.9 does not do is give you a new deadline. The appeal timetable is unchanged by a rehearing, and you are still owed at least 10 school days' notice of the hearing for the new date under paragraph 2.7.

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

Why the constitution rules are worth this much attention

Because of what the thing being constituted can do.

Two guarantees in one paragraph. The decision is binding — three people with no stake in the outcome can require the admission authority to admit your child, and "we are full" is not an answer to it, because the panel reached its decision knowing the school was full. And there are exactly two outcomes. A panel cannot uphold your appeal on condition that a place comes free, cannot uphold it in principle, and cannot split the difference. Whatever else happens, you get an answer.

Paragraph 2.26 requires appeals to be decided by a simple majority of the votes cast, with the chair holding a second or casting vote where the votes are equally divided. So on a panel of three a case can be upheld two to one, and the lay member's vote weighs exactly as much as the education member's.

That is the payoff for all of section 1. A body that can bind a local authority or an academy trust has to be constituted like one that can, and the disqualification list, the independence requirement and the training floor are the price of the decision being worth having.

What the decision letter must contain, and what happens next either way: After the decision

If you think the panel was not properly constituted

Before the hearing, this is a question for the clerk and it is cheap to raise. The names reach you under paragraph 2.10 expressly so that objections regarding impartiality can be notified to the clerk, and the clerk is under a duty at 1.7 not to allow a disqualified person to be a member. Write, name the member, name the limb of 1.7 you say applies, and say what the connection is. Do it as soon as the papers arrive.

Afterwards, it is a complaint, and a complaint is not a second appeal. Say that to yourself plainly, because the distinction governs everything that follows: paragraph 5.4 gives a route to complain about maladministration on the part of an appeal panel, and Appendix 2 paragraph 1 defines that route as being about the administration of an appeal rather than the appeal decision, with failure to follow correct procedures and failure to act independently and fairly as its examples. Constitution and independence sit squarely inside that. For academies, paragraph 5.6(a) puts whether the panel was correctly constituted by the admission authority among the things the Secretary of State may consider. Nothing in either route can give you the place, and the best realistic outcome is a rehearing.

Both complaint routes, who investigates which, and what each of them cannot do: After the decision

Independence is a guarantee about the process, not a promise about the outcome

This is the part of the page worth reading twice, because the rest of it can leave a misleading impression. Everything above is a guarantee about how your appeal is decided. None of it is a guarantee about what is decided.

Across England 19.4% of appeals heard were upheld — 22,402 of 115,695 appeals heard in 2024–2026 — so roughly four in five were dismissed. That is a national figure covering every appeal heard in England, and outcomes are published by council rather than by school, so nobody publishes a rate for the school you are appealing for. Rates vary a great deal between councils, and all of it is a description of what happened to other families rather than a forecast about yours.

Most of those dismissals were properly constituted panels doing exactly what they were constituted to do. The independence rules do not make a panel sympathetic and were never meant to. They make it impartial, which is a different thing: it means nobody in the room needed you to lose, not that anybody in the room wanted you to win. A panel with no connection to the school, trained in admissions law, applying the test at paragraphs 3.2, 3.3 and 3.8 to a case that does not meet it, will dismiss the appeal. That is the system working.

What is a constitution point is a fact about a person: a named member who governs the school, who works for it, who took part in the decision you are appealing, who has a connection to it that a reasonable person would think raises doubts, or who has not had the training the admission authority required. Facts about people, raised with the clerk, before the hearing.

Which is why the time is better spent elsewhere. The panel is almost always properly constituted, and the appeals that succeed do so on what was put in front of it. If you have an hour, spend it on what a panel is permitted to act on rather than on who is sitting — that is the half that decides most appeals, and it is the half most families never look at.

The first-stage argument that comes closest to this one, and where a real procedural failure actually bites: A mistake in how the decision was made

Every paragraph number on this page is from the School Admission Appeals Code 2022, except the reference to Appendix 2, which is to that appendix of the same Code and numbers its paragraphs from 1 separately from the main sections — so "Appendix 2, paragraph 1" is not paragraph 2.1. Where this page says a panel, a clerk or an admission authority "must" do something, the Code uses that word too; where it says "should" or "wherever possible" — as 1.11 does about keeping the same clerk — this page keeps that word. The disqualifications at 1.7 are those in the School Admissions (Appeal Arrangements) (England) Regulations 2012, which paragraph 1.7 sets out. The second column of the disqualification table is a reading of the Code's wording rather than anything additional the Code says. 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.
• 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.
• 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.