School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Mossley Hollins High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 36 families who named Mossley Hollins High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 178 and 206 put it first.

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

1.16

first choices for every place available

206 first preferences for 178 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Mossley Hollins High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Mossley Hollins 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 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

Mossley Hollins High School turned first-choice families away in 11 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 Mossley Hollins 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 1.44 per place 226 first choices 157 places 2016/17 1.31 per place 204 first choices 156 places 2017/18 1.45 per place 225 first choices 155 places 2018/19 1.08 per place 193 first choices 179 places 2019/20 1.43 per place 258 first choices 181 places 2020/21 1.45 per place 254 first choices 175 places 2021/22 1.4 per place 251 first choices 179 places 2022/23 1.38 per place 238 first choices 173 places 2023/24 1.27 per place 224 first choices 176 places 2024/25 0.99 per place 170 first choices 172 places 2025/26 1.15 per place 195 first choices 169 places 2026/27 1.16 per place 206 first choices 178 places
First preferences per place at Mossley Hollins High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 206 first preferences for 178 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Mossley Hollins 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
2015/16 157 226 155 1.44
2016/17 156 204 156 1.31
2017/18 155 225 155 1.45
2018/19 179 193 169 1.08
2019/20 181 258 178 1.43
2020/21 175 254 174 1.45
2021/22 179 251 176 1.4
2022/23 173 238 171 1.38
2023/24 176 224 175 1.27
2024/25 172 170 162 0.99
2025/26 169 195 160 1.15
2026/27 178 206 170 1.16

Places offered

178

in 2026/27

Named first choice

206

457 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.5%

170 of 206

Offers to families outside the council

2%

3 of 178 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 106266.

How close you had to live

Mossley Hollins High School filled its places in 2026, and 776m — 0.48 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 5 , which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

0.48 mi

776 metres, 2026

Under criterion

5

as numbered by the school

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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

894

99.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

6

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

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 Mossley Hollins 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 Mossley Hollins High School reported 6 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.3% 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 Mossley Hollins High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 635 places 750 on roll 2010/11 750 places 761 on roll 2011/12 750 places 759 on roll 2012/13 750 places 753 on roll 2013/14 750 places 766 on roll 2014/15 780 places 774 on roll 2015/16 780 places 779 on roll 2016/17 780 places 780 on roll 2017/18 780 places 792 on roll 2018/19 900 places 810 on roll 2020/21 900 places 852 on roll 2021/22 900 places 880 on roll 2022/23 900 places 885 on roll 2023/24 900 places 891 on roll 2024/25 900 places 894 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. Mossley Hollins High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Mossley Hollins High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
23 August 2017 No fault found ADA3258

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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Tameside

Postcode OL5 9DP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 148688).

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.