School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Great Wyrley Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 6 families who named Great Wyrley Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 129 put it first and 123 of them were offered one.

Below: what an appeal in Staffordshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 8 years of official figures.

6

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

129 first preferences for 148 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Great Wyrley Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Great Wyrley 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

Great Wyrley Academy turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 8 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 Great Wyrley Academy, 2019/20 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 19/20 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2019/20 0.67 per place 62 first choices 93 places 2020/21 0.8 per place 67 first choices 84 places 2021/22 0.69 per place 60 first choices 87 places 2022/23 0.93 per place 109 first choices 117 places 2023/24 0.86 per place 99 first choices 115 places 2024/25 0.89 per place 103 first choices 116 places 2025/26 0.88 per place 127 first choices 144 places 2026/27 0.87 per place 129 first choices 148 places
First preferences per place at Great Wyrley Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 129 first preferences for 148 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Great Wyrley Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2019/20 93 62 62 0.67
2020/21 84 67 66 0.8
2021/22 87 60 60 0.69
2022/23 117 109 109 0.93
2023/24 115 99 99 0.86
2024/25 116 103 92 0.89
2025/26 144 127 123 0.88
2026/27 148 129 123 0.87

Places offered

148

in 2026/27

Named first choice

129

344 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

95.3%

123 of 129

Offers to families outside the council

30%

45 of 148 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Great Wyrley 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 Great Wyrley 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.

Great Wyrley 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

881

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

543

61.6% of capacity

Unfilled places

338

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

200

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 Great Wyrley 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 Great Wyrley Academy reported 338 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 61.6% 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, 2018/19 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Great Wyrley Academy from 2018/19 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2018/19 1,081 places 604 on roll 2020/21 1,081 places 517 on roll 2021/22 1,081 places 507 on roll 2022/23 1,081 places 530 on roll 2023/24 1,081 places 549 on roll 2024/25 1,081 places 566 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Staffordshire

Postcode WS6 6LQ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 144988).

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.