School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Laurus Ryecroft?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 82 families who named Laurus Ryecroft as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 198 and 270 put it first.

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

1.36

first choices for every place available

270 first preferences for 198 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Laurus Ryecroft

There is no published appeal success rate for Laurus Ryecroft, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Tameside 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 Tameside, 12.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 82 of 635 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 Tameside.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Tameside 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

Laurus Ryecroft turned first-choice families away in 7 of the last 8 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Laurus Ryecroft, 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 1.34 per place 199 first choices 149 places 2020/21 0.85 per place 179 first choices 210 places 2021/22 1.45 per place 310 first choices 214 places 2022/23 1.35 per place 289 first choices 214 places 2023/24 1.13 per place 237 first choices 210 places 2024/25 1.32 per place 265 first choices 200 places 2025/26 1.53 per place 308 first choices 201 places 2026/27 1.36 per place 270 first choices 198 places
First preferences per place at Laurus Ryecroft. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 270 first preferences for 198 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Laurus Ryecroft, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2019/20 149 199 128 1.34
2020/21 210 179 168 0.85
2021/22 214 310 199 1.45
2022/23 214 289 204 1.35
2023/24 210 237 188 1.13
2024/25 200 265 180 1.32
2025/26 201 308 195 1.53
2026/27 198 270 188 1.36

Places offered

198

in 2026/27

Named first choice

270

679 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

69.6%

188 of 270

Offers to families outside the council

5%

10 of 198 offers

How close you had to live

Laurus Ryecroft filled its places in 2026, and 1,955m — 1.21 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the e criterion.

Last place offered at

1.21 mi

1,955 metres, 2026

Under criterion

E

as the council described it

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Tameside Council, allocation statistics for 2026. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

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

1,050

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,058

100.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

8

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

300

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 Laurus Ryecroft 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 Laurus Ryecroft 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, 2018/19 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Laurus Ryecroft from 2018/19 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2018/19 1,050 places 154 on roll 2020/21 1,050 places 521 on roll 2021/22 1,050 places 738 on roll 2022/23 1,050 places 951 on roll 2023/24 1,350 places 1,049 on roll 2024/25 1,350 places 1,135 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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Tameside

Postcode M43 7LJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 145894).

Other contested secondary schools in Tameside

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.