School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Cheslyn Hay Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 20 families who named Cheslyn Hay Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 222 and 229 put it first.

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

1.03

first choices for every place available

229 first preferences for 222 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Cheslyn Hay Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Cheslyn Hay Academy, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Staffordshire 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 Staffordshire, 20.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 157 of 752 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 Staffordshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Staffordshire 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

Cheslyn Hay Academy turned first-choice families away in 6 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 Cheslyn Hay Academy, 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 1.07 per place 237 first choices 221 places 2016/17 1.09 per place 243 first choices 223 places 2017/18 1.1 per place 247 first choices 224 places 2018/19 1.05 per place 254 first choices 243 places 2019/20 0.97 per place 214 first choices 221 places 2020/21 0.95 per place 208 first choices 220 places 2021/22 0.95 per place 210 first choices 222 places 2022/23 0.95 per place 209 first choices 221 places 2023/24 0.99 per place 222 first choices 225 places 2024/25 1.19 per place 264 first choices 222 places 2025/26 0.96 per place 209 first choices 217 places 2026/27 1.03 per place 229 first choices 222 places
First preferences per place at Cheslyn Hay Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 229 first preferences for 222 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Cheslyn Hay Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 221 237 213 1.07
2016/17 223 243 211 1.09
2017/18 224 247 216 1.1
2018/19 243 254 233 1.05
2019/20 221 214 208 0.97
2020/21 220 208 205 0.95
2021/22 222 210 208 0.95
2022/23 221 209 209 0.95
2023/24 225 222 218 0.99
2024/25 222 264 217 1.19
2025/26 217 209 202 0.96
2026/27 222 229 209 1.03

Places offered

222

in 2026/27

Named first choice

229

426 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

91.3%

209 of 229

Offers to families outside the council

9%

20 of 222 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 124425.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Cheslyn Hay Academy 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 Cheslyn Hay Academy, 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 Children in Care and children who ceased to be in care because they were adopted (or became subject to a residence order or special guardianship order) 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. See additional note * below.
2 Children who satisfy both of the following tests: Test 1: the child is distinguished from the great majority of applicants either on their own medical grounds or by other exceptional circumstances. Medical grounds must be supported by a medical report (obtained by the applicant and provided at the point of application). This report must clearly justify, for health reasons only, why it is better for the child’s health to attend the Academy rather than any other school. Exceptional circumstances must relate to the choice of school and the individual child, i.e. the circumstances of the child, not the economic or social circumstances of the parent/carer. […] criterion continues in the source document
3 Children who have an elder sibling in attendance at the Academy and who will still be attending the school at the proposed admission date; (For the application to be prioritised under this criteria the children must be living at the same home address for the majority of the school week and either: have one or both natural parents in common; are related by a parents marriage; are adopted or fostered by a common parent or are unrelated children who live at the same address, whose parents live as partners.)
4 Children living within the catchment area. see additional notes ** below
5 Children who attend our major contributory schools, Cheslyn Hay, Glenthorne, St John’s, Featherstone and Havergal.
6 Other children arranged in order of priority according to how near their home addresses are to the main gate of the Academy, determined by a straight-line measurement as calculated by the Local Authority’s Geographical Information System. see additional note *** below Where it is not possible to accommodate all children applying for places within a particular category then the Academy will allocate the available places in accordance with the remaining criteria. If for instance, all the catchment area children cannot be accommodated at an Academy, children who are resident within the catchment area will be arranged in order of priority according to distance i.e. category (6). […] criterion continues in the source document

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.

Cheslyn Hay Academy'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

1,120

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,079

96.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

41

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

181

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 Cheslyn Hay Academy 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 Cheslyn Hay Academy reported 41 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 96.3% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Cheslyn Hay Academy from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,302 places 1,371 on roll 2010/11 1,312 places 1,347 on roll 2011/12 1,312 places 1,331 on roll 2012/13 1,283 places 1,322 on roll 2013/14 1,290 places 1,305 on roll 2014/15 1,277 places 1,282 on roll 2015/16 1,266 places 1,294 on roll 2016/17 1,311 places 1,294 on roll 2017/18 1,301 places 1,264 on roll 2018/19 1,301 places 1,273 on roll 2020/21 1,301 places 1,253 on roll 2021/22 1,301 places 1,239 on roll 2022/23 1,301 places 1,247 on roll 2023/24 1,301 places 1,244 on roll 2024/25 1,301 places 1,269 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
Staffordshire

Postcode WS6 7JQ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 146443).

Other contested secondary schools in Staffordshire

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.