School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Arden?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 32 families who named Arden as their first choice did not get a place: 307 put it first and 275 of them were offered one.

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

32

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

307 first preferences for 315 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Arden

There is no published appeal success rate for Arden, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Solihull 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 Solihull, 2.8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 18 of 648 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 Solihull.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Solihull 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

Arden turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 10 of those years. In the other 1 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at Arden, 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 1.3 per place 306 first choices 235 places 2016/17 1.09 per place 322 first choices 296 places 2017/18 1.12 per place 328 first choices 294 places 2018/19 1.1 per place 331 first choices 300 places 2019/20 1.24 per place 367 first choices 296 places 2020/21 1.14 per place 339 first choices 298 places 2021/22 1.16 per place 342 first choices 295 places 2022/23 1.26 per place 375 first choices 298 places 2023/24 1.13 per place 334 first choices 295 places 2024/25 1.16 per place 344 first choices 297 places 2025/26 0.91 per place 269 first choices 295 places 2026/27 0.97 per place 307 first choices 315 places
First preferences per place at Arden. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 307 first preferences for 315 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Arden, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 235 306 225 1.3
2016/17 296 322 278 1.09
2017/18 294 328 272 1.12
2018/19 300 331 280 1.1
2019/20 296 367 281 1.24
2020/21 298 339 278 1.14
2021/22 295 342 274 1.16
2022/23 298 375 282 1.26
2023/24 295 334 270 1.13
2024/25 297 344 281 1.16
2025/26 295 269 245 0.91
2026/27 315 307 275 0.97

Places offered

315

in 2026/27

Named first choice

307

899 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

89.6%

275 of 307

Offers to families outside the council

4%

13 of 315 offers

How close you had to live

Arden filled its places in 2025, and 5,174m — 3.21 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the distance criterion.

Last place offered at

3.21 mi

5,174 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

Range across years with a cut-off

2.10–4.32 mi

3 years, 2023 to 2025

The last place offered at Arden, by admission year. Each year is a separate round with its own applicants, not a trend.
Year Distance Criterion the last place went under
2025 3.21 miles (5,174m) Distance
2024 4.32 miles (6,952m) Sibling (Out of catchment)
2023 2.10 miles (3,380m) Sibling (Out of Catchment)

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also moves a great deal. Across the years published here it has ranged from 2.10 to 4.32 miles — a 2.1-fold spread — because it is set by who happened to apply that year, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Solihull Council, allocation statistics for 2023–2025. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

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

1,500

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,503

100.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

3

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

350

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 Arden 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 Arden 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Arden from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 950 1,900 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,341 places 1,457 on roll 2011/12 1,490 places 1,500 on roll 2012/13 1,490 places 1,519 on roll 2013/14 1,450 places 1,523 on roll 2014/15 1,450 places 1,574 on roll 2015/16 1,900 places 1,594 on roll 2016/17 1,850 places 1,577 on roll 2017/18 1,850 places 1,607 on roll 2018/19 1,850 places 1,700 on roll 2020/21 1,850 places 1,810 on roll 2021/22 1,850 places 1,810 on roll 2022/23 1,850 places 1,809 on roll 2023/24 1,850 places 1,813 on roll 2024/25 1,850 places 1,810 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
Solihull

Postcode B93 0PT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136333).

Other contested secondary schools in Solihull

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.