School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Swindon Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 37 families who named Swindon Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 200 and 224 put it first.

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

1.12

first choices for every place available

224 first preferences for 200 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Swindon Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Swindon 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 Swindon 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 Swindon, 15.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 25 of 163 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 Swindon.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Swindon 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

Swindon 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 Swindon 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 ratio not published 19 first choices 34 places 2016/17 0.72 per place 34 first choices 47 places 2017/18 0.47 per place 70 first choices 149 places 2018/19 0.83 per place 165 first choices 198 places 2019/20 0.91 per place 187 first choices 205 places 2020/21 1.2 per place 204 first choices 170 places 2021/22 1.09 per place 190 first choices 174 places 2022/23 1.27 per place 218 first choices 172 places 2023/24 1.07 per place 198 first choices 185 places 2024/25 0.96 per place 193 first choices 200 places 2025/26 1.16 per place 232 first choices 200 places 2026/27 1.12 per place 224 first choices 200 places
First preferences per place at Swindon Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 224 first preferences for 200 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Swindon 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 34 19 19 too small to publish
2016/17 47 34 34 0.72
2017/18 149 70 70 0.47
2018/19 198 165 164 0.83
2019/20 205 187 187 0.91
2020/21 170 204 169 1.2
2021/22 174 190 173 1.09
2022/23 172 218 171 1.27
2023/24 185 198 176 1.07
2024/25 200 193 186 0.96
2025/26 200 232 192 1.16
2026/27 200 224 187 1.12

Places offered

200

in 2026/27

Named first choice

224

442 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

83.5%

187 of 224

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 200 offers

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

1,850

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,596

86.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

254

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

250

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 Swindon 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 Swindon Academy reported 254 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 86.3% 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 Swindon Academy from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,100 2,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,646 places 1,439 on roll 2010/11 1,646 places 1,513 on roll 2011/12 2,040 places 1,535 on roll 2012/13 2,040 places 1,588 on roll 2013/14 2,040 places 1,669 on roll 2014/15 2,040 places 1,588 on roll 2015/16 2,040 places 1,501 on roll 2016/17 2,040 places 1,575 on roll 2017/18 2,040 places 1,588 on roll 2018/19 2,040 places 1,623 on roll 2020/21 2,130 places 1,804 on roll 2021/22 2,100 places 1,809 on roll 2022/23 2,100 places 1,788 on roll 2023/24 2,100 places 1,764 on roll 2024/25 2,100 places 1,758 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.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Swindon Academy has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Swindon Academy. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
23 November 2017 No fault found REF3346

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

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
Swindon

Postcode SN2 1JR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 135364).

Other contested secondary schools in Swindon

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.