School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Formby High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 19 families who named Formby High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 168 and 185 put it first.

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

1.10

first choices for every place available

185 first preferences for 168 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Formby High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Formby 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 Sefton 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 Sefton, 21.8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 137 of 628 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 Sefton.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Sefton 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

Formby High School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Formby 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 1.23 per place 196 first choices 160 places 2016/17 1.47 per place 243 first choices 165 places 2017/18 1.17 per place 218 first choices 186 places 2018/19 1.35 per place 251 first choices 186 places 2019/20 1.37 per place 254 first choices 186 places 2020/21 1.36 per place 251 first choices 184 places 2021/22 1.32 per place 211 first choices 160 places 2022/23 1.42 per place 225 first choices 159 places 2023/24 1.22 per place 206 first choices 169 places 2024/25 1.08 per place 185 first choices 171 places 2025/26 1.23 per place 200 first choices 163 places 2026/27 1.1 per place 185 first choices 168 places
First preferences per place at Formby High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 185 first preferences for 168 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Formby 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
2015/16 160 196 159 1.23
2016/17 165 243 165 1.47
2017/18 186 218 186 1.17
2018/19 186 251 186 1.35
2019/20 186 254 184 1.37
2020/21 184 251 183 1.36
2021/22 160 211 159 1.32
2022/23 159 225 157 1.42
2023/24 169 206 168 1.22
2024/25 171 185 169 1.08
2025/26 163 200 162 1.23
2026/27 168 185 166 1.1

Places offered

168

in 2026/27

Named first choice

185

413 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

89.7%

166 of 185

Offers to families outside the council

1%

2 of 168 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Formby High School 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 Formby High School, 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 Cared for Children and all previously looked after children, including those children who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted (or became subject to a child arrangements order or special guardianship order).* (1) A Cared for Child is a child who, at the time of making an application to a school, is in the care of a local authority or is being provided with accommodation by a local authority in England in the exercise of their social services functions (see definition in section 22(1) of the Children Act 1989). […] criterion continues in the source document
2 Sibling – children who have a brother or sister living in the same house who already attends the school, as long as he/she will still be at the school in September 2025. Brothers and sisters include step-children, foster children and half-brothers and sisters, adopted brothers and sisters or children of the parent/carer’s partner, living in the same family unit at the same address who attend Formby High School, as long as they will be at the school in September 2025. (1)
3 Contributory Primary – children who, at the start of the Spring Term 2025, are on the roll of either: Freshfield Primary School, Redgate Primary School or Trinity St Peter’s Church of England Primary School. (1)
4 Children of Staff – where the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the admission application for the school is made or where the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. Parents/carers must state the name of the employee on their application form. Details will be validated by the school. (1)
5 Named Areas – other children living in Formby, Hightown or Ince Blundell. (1)
6 Distance – other requests that name the school as a preference. (1)

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.

Formby High School'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

839

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

868

103.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

29

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

253

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 Formby 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 Formby 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Formby High School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 989 places 990 on roll 2012/13 989 places 996 on roll 2013/14 989 places 1,027 on roll 2014/15 989 places 1,026 on roll 2015/16 989 places 1,011 on roll 2016/17 989 places 1,024 on roll 2017/18 1,045 places 1,086 on roll 2018/19 1,045 places 1,143 on roll 2020/21 1,088 places 1,171 on roll 2021/22 1,088 places 1,157 on roll 2022/23 1,088 places 1,113 on roll 2023/24 1,088 places 1,096 on roll 2024/25 1,092 places 1,099 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
Sefton

Postcode L37 3HW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137436).

Other contested secondary schools in Sefton

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.