School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at John Taylor High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 19 families who named John Taylor High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 242 and 251 put it first.

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

1.04

first choices for every place available

251 first preferences for 242 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at John Taylor High School

There is no published appeal success rate for John Taylor High 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 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

John Taylor High School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at John Taylor High 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 1.21 per place 312 first choices 257 places 2016/17 1.09 per place 280 first choices 258 places 2017/18 1.33 per place 345 first choices 259 places 2018/19 1.04 per place 272 first choices 262 places 2019/20 1.15 per place 275 first choices 240 places 2020/21 1.07 per place 275 first choices 257 places 2021/22 1.19 per place 278 first choices 234 places 2022/23 1.13 per place 269 first choices 239 places 2023/24 1.06 per place 251 first choices 237 places 2024/25 1.2 per place 283 first choices 236 places 2025/26 1.18 per place 283 first choices 240 places 2026/27 1.04 per place 251 first choices 242 places
First preferences per place at John Taylor High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 251 first preferences for 242 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at John Taylor High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 257 312 256 1.21
2016/17 258 280 254 1.09
2017/18 259 345 258 1.33
2018/19 262 272 258 1.04
2019/20 240 275 235 1.15
2020/21 257 275 253 1.07
2021/22 234 278 231 1.19
2022/23 239 269 232 1.13
2023/24 237 251 231 1.06
2024/25 236 283 233 1.2
2025/26 240 283 236 1.18
2026/27 242 251 232 1.04

Places offered

242

in 2026/27

Named first choice

251

465 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

92.4%

232 of 251

Offers to families outside the council

10%

25 of 242 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria John Taylor High School 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 John Taylor High School, 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 Children in care and children who ceased to be in care because they were adopted (or became subject to a child arrangement 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 notes
2 Children living within the catchment area of the school. **see additional notes.
3 Children who have a sibling in attendance at the school at the time of application; (For admission purposes, a brother or sister is a child who lives at the same address and either: have one or both natural parents in common; are related by a parent’s 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 whose parents are employed by JTMAT to work at John Taylor High School in either or both of the following circumstances:
a) Where the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, and/or
b) Children whose parents are employed by JTMAT to work at John Taylor High School where the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage.
4 Other children arranged in order of priority according to how near their home addresses are to the main gate of the school, determined by a straight-line measurement, as calculated by the local authority’s Geographical Information System. ***see additional notes Additional Notes * Children in care means children who are looked after by a Local Authority in accordance with section 22 (1) of the Children Act 1989 and who is (a) in care of a Local Authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a Local Authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see definition in section 22 (1) of the Children Act 1989) at the time of making an application to a school. […] 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 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.

John Taylor High School'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

1,400

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,188

84.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

212

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

400

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 John Taylor High 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 John Taylor High School reported 212 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 84.9% 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at John Taylor High School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 900 1,800 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,800 places 1,456 on roll 2011/12 1,800 places 1,453 on roll 2012/13 1,800 places 1,474 on roll 2013/14 1,437 places 1,474 on roll 2014/15 1,437 places 1,453 on roll 2015/16 1,543 places 1,517 on roll 2016/17 1,621 places 1,542 on roll 2017/18 1,621 places 1,564 on roll 2018/19 1,621 places 1,587 on roll 2020/21 1,800 places 1,642 on roll 2021/22 1,800 places 1,617 on roll 2022/23 1,800 places 1,556 on roll 2023/24 1,800 places 1,508 on roll 2024/25 1,800 places 1,504 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 DE13 8AZ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136323).

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.