School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Trinity Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 45 families who named Trinity Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 232 and 253 put it first.

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

1.09

first choices for every place available

253 first preferences for 232 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Trinity Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Trinity Catholic High 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 Redbridge 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 Redbridge, 7.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 45 of 567 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 Redbridge.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Redbridge 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

Trinity Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 11 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 Trinity Catholic High 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 1.38 per place 319 first choices 231 places 2016/17 1.47 per place 340 first choices 232 places 2017/18 1.31 per place 301 first choices 230 places 2018/19 1.31 per place 308 first choices 235 places 2019/20 1.22 per place 282 first choices 231 places 2020/21 1.27 per place 294 first choices 232 places 2021/22 1.03 per place 239 first choices 231 places 2022/23 1.31 per place 303 first choices 231 places 2023/24 1.1 per place 242 first choices 221 places 2024/25 1.06 per place 247 first choices 232 places 2025/26 0.85 per place 200 first choices 236 places 2026/27 1.09 per place 253 first choices 232 places
First preferences per place at Trinity Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 253 first preferences for 232 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Trinity Catholic High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 231 319 222 1.38
2016/17 232 340 223 1.47
2017/18 230 301 219 1.31
2018/19 235 308 219 1.31
2019/20 231 282 212 1.22
2020/21 232 294 223 1.27
2021/22 231 239 204 1.03
2022/23 231 303 220 1.31
2023/24 221 242 195 1.1
2024/25 232 247 205 1.06
2025/26 236 200 194 0.85
2026/27 232 253 208 1.09

Places offered

232

in 2026/27

Named first choice

253

683 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.2%

208 of 253

Offers to families outside the council

61%

141 of 232 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

1,157

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,187

102.6% of capacity

Over its capacity by

30

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

480

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 Trinity Catholic High 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 Trinity Catholic High School was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Trinity Catholic High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,518 places 1,684 on roll 2010/11 1,518 places 1,666 on roll 2011/12 1,518 places 1,661 on roll 2012/13 1,547 places 1,689 on roll 2013/14 1,547 places 1,690 on roll 2014/15 1,547 places 1,687 on roll 2015/16 1,547 places 1,633 on roll 2016/17 1,547 places 1,630 on roll 2017/18 1,680 places 1,665 on roll 2018/19 1,680 places 1,700 on roll 2020/21 1,680 places 1,660 on roll 2021/22 1,680 places 1,619 on roll 2022/23 1,680 places 1,637 on roll 2023/24 1,680 places 1,629 on roll 2024/25 1,637 places 1,593 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.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Trinity Catholic High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Trinity Catholic High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
20 November 2015 Arrangements did not comply ADA2917

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Redbridge

Postcode IG8 0TP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 102860).

Other contested secondary schools in Redbridge

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.