School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Canary Wharf College Crossharbour?

In 2026/27, Canary Wharf College Crossharbour offered 74 places and 59 families named it as their first choice.

Below: what an appeal in Tower Hamlets actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 10 years of official figures.

0.80

first choices for every place available

59 first preferences for 74 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Canary Wharf College Crossharbour

There is no published appeal success rate for Canary Wharf College Crossharbour, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Tower Hamlets 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 Tower Hamlets, 2.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 15 of 662 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 Tower Hamlets.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Tower Hamlets 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

Canary Wharf College Crossharbour turned first-choice families away in 9 of the last 10 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Canary Wharf College Crossharbour, 2017/18 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.6 1.3 1.9 2.5 one first preference per place 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2017/18 1.59 per place 59 first choices 37 places 2018/19 1.71 per place 133 first choices 78 places 2019/20 2.01 per place 149 first choices 74 places 2020/21 1.56 per place 169 first choices 108 places 2021/22 1.66 per place 166 first choices 100 places 2022/23 2.08 per place 158 first choices 76 places 2023/24 1.83 per place 148 first choices 81 places 2024/25 2.04 per place 153 first choices 75 places 2025/26 1.08 per place 81 first choices 75 places 2026/27 0.8 per place 59 first choices 74 places
First preferences per place at Canary Wharf College Crossharbour. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 59 first preferences for 74 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Canary Wharf College Crossharbour, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2017/18 37 59 29 1.59
2018/19 78 133 68 1.71
2019/20 74 149 68 2.01
2020/21 108 169 97 1.56
2021/22 100 166 91 1.66
2022/23 76 158 67 2.08
2023/24 81 148 72 1.83
2024/25 75 153 72 2.04
2025/26 75 81 67 1.08
2026/27 74 59 59 0.8

Places offered

74

in 2026/27

Named first choice

59

197 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

59 of 59

Offers to families outside the council

4%

3 of 74 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

405

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

459

113.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

54

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 Canary Wharf College Crossharbour 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 Canary Wharf College Crossharbour 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, 2016/17 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Canary Wharf College Crossharbour from 2016/17 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 16/17 17/18 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2016/17 810 places 40 on roll 2017/18 1,200 places 80 on roll 2018/19 1,200 places 160 on roll 2020/21 1,200 places 342 on roll 2021/22 1,200 places 407 on roll 2022/23 405 places 462 on roll 2023/24 405 places 478 on roll 2024/25 405 places 459 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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Tower Hamlets

Postcode E14 9GL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 142879).

Other contested secondary schools in Tower Hamlets

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.