School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Sir Graham Balfour High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 10 families who named Sir Graham Balfour High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 185 and 186 put it first.

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

1.01

first choices for every place available

186 first preferences for 185 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Sir Graham Balfour High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Sir Graham Balfour 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

Sir Graham Balfour High School turned first-choice families away in 8 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 Sir Graham Balfour 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 0.97 per place 171 first choices 177 places 2016/17 0.99 per place 167 first choices 169 places 2017/18 0.99 per place 184 first choices 185 places 2018/19 1.28 per place 227 first choices 178 places 2019/20 1.16 per place 228 first choices 197 places 2020/21 1.11 per place 197 first choices 178 places 2021/22 0.95 per place 161 first choices 170 places 2022/23 1.03 per place 205 first choices 199 places 2023/24 1.06 per place 206 first choices 195 places 2024/25 1.09 per place 224 first choices 205 places 2025/26 1.09 per place 212 first choices 194 places 2026/27 1.01 per place 186 first choices 185 places
First preferences per place at Sir Graham Balfour High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 186 first preferences for 185 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Sir Graham Balfour 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
2015/16 177 171 171 0.97
2016/17 169 167 163 0.99
2017/18 185 184 180 0.99
2018/19 178 227 170 1.28
2019/20 197 228 196 1.16
2020/21 178 197 174 1.11
2021/22 170 161 161 0.95
2022/23 199 205 198 1.03
2023/24 195 206 193 1.06
2024/25 205 224 204 1.09
2025/26 194 212 182 1.09
2026/27 185 186 176 1.01

Places offered

185

in 2026/27

Named first choice

186

340 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

94.6%

176 of 186

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 185 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 124444.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Sir Graham Balfour 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 Sir Graham Balfour 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 arrangements 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 preferred school 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

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.

Sir Graham Balfour 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

922

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

935

101.4% of capacity

Over its capacity by

13

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

120

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 Sir Graham Balfour 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 Sir Graham Balfour High 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Sir Graham Balfour High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 917 places 1,015 on roll 2010/11 939 places 1,010 on roll 2011/12 939 places 979 on roll 2012/13 939 places 933 on roll 2013/14 939 places 893 on roll 2014/15 925 places 873 on roll 2015/16 925 places 890 on roll 2016/17 925 places 932 on roll 2017/18 925 places 927 on roll 2018/19 925 places 939 on roll 2020/21 925 places 957 on roll 2021/22 1,042 places 950 on roll 2022/23 1,042 places 961 on roll 2023/24 1,042 places 970 on roll 2024/25 1,042 places 1,003 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 ST16 1NR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 142983).

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.