School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at West Hill School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 49 families who named West Hill School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 161 and 201 put it first.

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

1.25

first choices for every place available

201 first preferences for 161 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at West Hill School

There is no published appeal success rate for West Hill 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

West Hill 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 West Hill 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 0.85 per place 140 first choices 164 places 2016/17 0.92 per place 157 first choices 170 places 2017/18 0.95 per place 161 first choices 170 places 2018/19 1.11 per place 188 first choices 170 places 2019/20 1.12 per place 190 first choices 169 places 2020/21 1.12 per place 190 first choices 169 places 2021/22 1.16 per place 193 first choices 167 places 2022/23 0.9 per place 149 first choices 166 places 2023/24 1.07 per place 183 first choices 171 places 2024/25 1.2 per place 198 first choices 165 places 2025/26 1.29 per place 203 first choices 157 places 2026/27 1.25 per place 201 first choices 161 places
First preferences per place at West Hill School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 201 first preferences for 161 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at West Hill School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 164 140 140 0.85
2016/17 170 157 152 0.92
2017/18 170 161 147 0.95
2018/19 170 188 155 1.11
2019/20 169 190 156 1.12
2020/21 169 190 153 1.12
2021/22 167 193 156 1.16
2022/23 166 149 146 0.9
2023/24 171 183 159 1.07
2024/25 165 198 156 1.2
2025/26 157 203 150 1.29
2026/27 161 201 152 1.25

Places offered

161

in 2026/27

Named first choice

201

413 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75.6%

152 of 201

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 161 offers

How close you had to live

West Hill School filled its places in 2026, and 2,123m — 1.32 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

1.32 mi

2,123 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

825

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

848

102.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

23

reported as full or beyond

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 West Hill 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 West Hill 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at West Hill School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 825 places 836 on roll 2012/13 825 places 823 on roll 2013/14 825 places 817 on roll 2014/15 825 places 808 on roll 2015/16 825 places 828 on roll 2016/17 825 places 834 on roll 2017/18 825 places 832 on roll 2018/19 825 places 840 on roll 2020/21 825 places 836 on roll 2021/22 825 places 840 on roll 2022/23 825 places 839 on roll 2023/24 825 places 848 on roll 2024/25 825 places 848 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
Tameside

Postcode SK15 1LX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137020).

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.