School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Wickersley School and Sports College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 22 families who named Wickersley School and Sports College as their first choice did not get a place: 329 put it first and 307 of them were offered one.

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

22

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

329 first preferences for 332 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Wickersley School and Sports College

There is no published appeal success rate for Wickersley School and Sports College, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Rotherham 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 Rotherham, 50.4% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 232 of 460 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 Rotherham.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Rotherham 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

Wickersley School and Sports College turned first-choice families away in 10 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 Wickersley School and Sports College, 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 1.25 per place 314 first choices 251 places 2016/17 1.13 per place 375 first choices 332 places 2017/18 1.28 per place 420 first choices 328 places 2018/19 1.29 per place 427 first choices 331 places 2019/20 1.41 per place 489 first choices 347 places 2020/21 1.29 per place 426 first choices 330 places 2021/22 1.22 per place 401 first choices 330 places 2022/23 1.21 per place 404 first choices 333 places 2023/24 1.13 per place 375 first choices 331 places 2024/25 1.06 per place 354 first choices 335 places 2025/26 0.94 per place 309 first choices 328 places 2026/27 0.99 per place 329 first choices 332 places
First preferences per place at Wickersley School and Sports College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 329 first preferences for 332 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Wickersley School and Sports College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 251 314 249 1.25
2016/17 332 375 325 1.13
2017/18 328 420 328 1.28
2018/19 331 427 330 1.29
2019/20 347 489 347 1.41
2020/21 330 426 330 1.29
2021/22 330 401 326 1.22
2022/23 333 404 332 1.21
2023/24 331 375 323 1.13
2024/25 335 354 318 1.06
2025/26 328 309 293 0.94
2026/27 332 329 307 0.99

Places offered

332

in 2026/27

Named first choice

329

676 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

93.3%

307 of 329

Offers to families outside the council

1%

4 of 332 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Wickersley School and Sports College published for 2025 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for Wickersley School and Sports College, 2025 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 A ‘relevant looked after child’ is a child that is looked after by a local authority in accordance with Section 22 of the Children Act 1989 at the time an application for admission to a school is made, and who the local authority has confirmed will still be looked after at the time when he/she is admitted to the school. Previously looked after children are children who were looked after but ceased to be so because they were adopted (or became subject to a child arrangements order or special guardianship order). […] criterion continues in the source document
2 Places will be allocated based on your residential address on 31st October 2024. Therefore, you must notify the Local Authority Admissions Team in writing if you change address before this date. You may be asked to provide proof of residence (e.g. utility/council tax bill). Documentary evidence of ownership or rental agreement may be required together with proof of actual permanent residency at the property concerned. The School / Trust / Local Authority reserves the right to request an affidavit where there is uncertainty regarding a child’s ordinary place of residence.
3 For a child to be considered a sibling, one of the following conditions must exist: (you may be asked to provide proof e.g., Birth Certificate and proof of residence)
4 brother/sister to be permanently resident at the same address.
5 stepbrother/stepsister to be permanently resident at the same address.
6 half-brother/half-sister to be permanently resident at the same address.
7 brother/sister who do not live at the same residence but, who share the same parents.
8 child of the parent/carer’s partner to be permanently resident at the same address.
9 adopted brother/sister permanently resident at the same address
10 foster brother/sister resident at the same address d) Children with an older sibling on the roll of the school who will be in Years 8-11 for the commencement of the 2025/26 academic year and are on the roll of the school on 31st October 2024.
11 Children of UK service personnel (UK Armed Forces) – For families of service personnel with a confirmed posting to their area, or crown servants returning from overseas to live in that area, admission authorities must allocate a place in advance of the family arriving in the area provided the application is accompanied by an official letter that declares a relocation date and a Unit postal address or quartering area address when considering the application against their oversubscription criteria. This must include accepting a Unit postal address or quartering area address for a service child. […] criterion continues in the source document
12 The Associated Primary (Feeder) Schools are: Wickersley Bramley Grange, Bramley Sunnyside, Flanderwell, Listerdale, St Albans, Wickersley Northfield.

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2025 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

Wickersley School and Sports College's determined admission arrangements for 2025 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

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

1,616

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,694

104.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

78

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

580

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 Wickersley School and Sports College 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 Wickersley School and Sports College 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Wickersley School and Sports College from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,250 2,500 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 1,923 places 2,004 on roll 2014/15 1,923 places 2,103 on roll 2015/16 2,200 places 2,050 on roll 2016/17 2,407 places 2,061 on roll 2017/18 2,280 places 2,089 on roll 2018/19 2,280 places 2,088 on roll 2020/21 2,280 places 2,125 on roll 2021/22 2,280 places 2,113 on roll 2022/23 2,280 places 2,090 on roll 2023/24 2,280 places 2,032 on roll 2024/25 2,196 places 1,995 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
Rotherham

Postcode S66 1JL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140646).

Other contested secondary schools in Rotherham

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.