School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Lode Heath School?

In 2026/27, Lode Heath School offered 246 places and 123 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.50

first choices for every place available

123 first preferences for 246 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Lode Heath School

There is no published appeal success rate for Lode Heath 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 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

Lode Heath School turned first-choice families away in 9 of the last 12 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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 Lode Heath 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 0.88 per place 211 first choices 239 places 2016/17 0.93 per place 221 first choices 238 places 2017/18 0.81 per place 193 first choices 237 places 2018/19 0.91 per place 217 first choices 239 places 2019/20 0.95 per place 228 first choices 239 places 2020/21 0.84 per place 199 first choices 237 places 2021/22 0.92 per place 216 first choices 235 places 2022/23 0.84 per place 198 first choices 237 places 2023/24 0.76 per place 179 first choices 237 places 2024/25 0.6 per place 140 first choices 234 places 2025/26 0.51 per place 117 first choices 230 places 2026/27 0.5 per place 123 first choices 246 places
First preferences per place at Lode Heath School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 123 first preferences for 246 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Lode Heath School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 239 211 196 0.88
2016/17 238 221 188 0.93
2017/18 237 193 157 0.81
2018/19 239 217 174 0.91
2019/20 239 228 170 0.95
2020/21 237 199 168 0.84
2021/22 235 216 176 0.92
2022/23 237 198 148 0.84
2023/24 237 179 141 0.76
2024/25 234 140 121 0.6
2025/26 230 117 117 0.51
2026/27 246 123 123 0.5

Places offered

246

in 2026/27

Named first choice

123

680 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

123 of 123

Offers to families outside the council

33%

71 of 213 offers

How close you had to live

Every applicant was offered a place at Lode Heath School in 2025. That is the most recent round Solihull has published, and it means there was no cut-off that year — nobody was turned away for living too far, so no distance exists to be measured against. The school did fill in 2024, when the last place went 2.34 miles out. That is the older round, not the current picture.

Last place offered at

No cut-off

everyone who applied was offered, 2025

Range across years with a cut-off

1.85–2.34 mi

2 years, 2023 to 2024

The last place offered at Lode Heath School, 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 None Everyone who applied was offered a place
2024 2.34 miles (3,766m) Distance
2023 1.85 miles (2,977m) Distance

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 changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

And the 2024 distance above is not this school's current picture: in 2025, the most recent round published, it turned nobody away.

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

1,134

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,143

100.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

9

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

0

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 Lode Heath 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 Lode Heath 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 Lode Heath 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 1,051 places 1,041 on roll 2012/13 1,051 places 1,042 on roll 2013/14 1,051 places 1,043 on roll 2014/15 1,051 places 1,040 on roll 2015/16 1,058 places 1,056 on roll 2016/17 1,134 places 1,085 on roll 2017/18 1,134 places 1,116 on roll 2018/19 1,134 places 1,130 on roll 2020/21 1,134 places 1,159 on roll 2021/22 1,134 places 1,165 on roll 2022/23 1,134 places 1,152 on roll 2023/24 1,134 places 1,155 on roll 2024/25 1,134 places 1,143 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 B91 2HW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137008).

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.