School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Meadowhead School Academy Trust?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 30 families who named Meadowhead School Academy Trust as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 339 and 345 put it first.

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

1.02

first choices for every place available

345 first preferences for 339 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Meadowhead School Academy Trust

There is no published appeal success rate for Meadowhead School Academy Trust, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Sheffield 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 Sheffield, 26.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 181 of 672 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 Sheffield.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Sheffield 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

Meadowhead School Academy Trust turned first-choice families away in 1 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 Meadowhead School Academy Trust, 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 0.98 per place 322 first choices 328 places 2016/17 1 per place 329 first choices 330 places 2017/18 0.98 per place 325 first choices 330 places 2018/19 0.92 per place 304 first choices 330 places 2019/20 0.88 per place 290 first choices 328 places 2020/21 0.83 per place 275 first choices 332 places 2021/22 0.8 per place 261 first choices 327 places 2022/23 0.81 per place 274 first choices 337 places 2023/24 0.85 per place 288 first choices 339 places 2024/25 0.83 per place 260 first choices 312 places 2025/26 0.89 per place 294 first choices 330 places 2026/27 1.02 per place 345 first choices 339 places
First preferences per place at Meadowhead School Academy Trust. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 345 first preferences for 339 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Meadowhead School Academy Trust, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 328 322 312 0.98
2016/17 330 329 314 1
2017/18 330 325 306 0.98
2018/19 330 304 304 0.92
2019/20 328 290 289 0.88
2020/21 332 275 275 0.83
2021/22 327 261 261 0.8
2022/23 337 274 273 0.81
2023/24 339 288 288 0.85
2024/25 312 260 260 0.83
2025/26 330 294 284 0.89
2026/27 339 345 315 1.02

Places offered

339

in 2026/27

Named first choice

345

586 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

91.3%

315 of 345

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 339 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Meadowhead School Academy Trust published for 2027 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 Meadowhead School Academy Trust, 2027 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 Highest priority will be given to looked after children and all previously looked after children who apply for a place at the school.
2 Pupils living in the catchment area, with a sibling* who is already attending Meadowhead School, and will still be on roll when the Y6 pupil transfers to Meadowhead School.
3 Pupils living in the catchment area and currently attending a Feeder Primary School. The named feeder schools are:
• Abbey Lane
• Bradway Primary
• Greenhill Primary
• Lowedges Primary
• Lower Meadow Primary
• Norton Free
• Woodseats Primary
4 Pupils living in the catchment area only. 5. Children who do not live in the catchment area who will have siblings* attending the school on the day of admission
5 Children who do not live in the catchment area but attend a designated Feeder Primary School.
6 All other applications *A child will only be afforded ‘sibling’ status if the older sibling has attended the school prior to Sixth Form.

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 2027 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.

Meadowhead School Academy Trust's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

1,742

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,637

94% of capacity

Unfilled places

105

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

208

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 Meadowhead School Academy Trust 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 Meadowhead School Academy Trust reported 105 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 94% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Meadowhead School Academy Trust from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,000 2,000 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,650 places 1,657 on roll 2013/14 1,950 places 1,744 on roll 2014/15 1,950 places 1,814 on roll 2015/16 1,950 places 1,842 on roll 2016/17 1,950 places 1,881 on roll 2017/18 1,950 places 1,830 on roll 2018/19 1,950 places 1,811 on roll 2020/21 1,950 places 1,837 on roll 2021/22 1,950 places 1,925 on roll 2022/23 1,950 places 1,912 on roll 2023/24 1,950 places 1,916 on roll 2024/25 1,950 places 1,967 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
Sheffield

Postcode S8 8BR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138545).

Other contested secondary schools in Sheffield

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.