School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 76 families who named Altrincham Grammar School for Girls as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 209 and 281 put it first.

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

1.34

first choices for every place available

281 first preferences for 209 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls

There is no published appeal success rate for Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Trafford 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 Trafford, 11.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 147 of 1,313 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 Trafford.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Trafford 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

Altrincham Grammar School for Girls turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, 2015/16 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 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.48 per place 326 first choices 220 places 2016/17 1.33 per place 291 first choices 218 places 2017/18 1.46 per place 267 first choices 183 places 2018/19 1.31 per place 289 first choices 220 places 2019/20 1.33 per place 288 first choices 217 places 2020/21 1.4 per place 307 first choices 219 places 2021/22 2.33 per place 482 first choices 207 places 2022/23 1.41 per place 294 first choices 209 places 2023/24 1.28 per place 268 first choices 210 places 2024/25 1.43 per place 305 first choices 214 places 2025/26 1.49 per place 310 first choices 208 places 2026/27 1.34 per place 281 first choices 209 places
First preferences per place at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 281 first preferences for 209 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 220 326 217 1.48
2016/17 218 291 215 1.33
2017/18 183 267 182 1.46
2018/19 220 289 216 1.31
2019/20 217 288 203 1.33
2020/21 219 307 215 1.4
2021/22 207 482 202 2.33
2022/23 209 294 208 1.41
2023/24 210 268 208 1.28
2024/25 214 305 211 1.43
2025/26 208 310 207 1.49
2026/27 209 281 205 1.34

Places offered

209

in 2026/27

Named first choice

281

443 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

73%

205 of 281

Offers to families outside the council

14%

29 of 209 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Altrincham Grammar School for Girls published for 2026 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, 2026 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Children who are Looked After or who have been previously Looked After, regardless of their place of residence (please see definitions on the front page of the policy);
2 Applicants residing within the school’s catchment area who are in receipt of pupil premium;
3 Applicants residing within the school’s catchment area who have a sister who will be a pupil of the school at the time of the applicant’s proposed admission;
4 Applicants residing within the school’s catchment area. Where the number of applicants qualifying for admission under this category exceeds the number of places available, then priority shall be given to those applicants residing closer to the school (see ‘distance’ in the

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2026 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

Altrincham Grammar School for Girls's determined admission arrangements for 2026 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

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

1,020

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,032

101.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

12

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

363

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 Altrincham Grammar School for Girls 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 Altrincham Grammar School for Girls 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 Altrincham Grammar School for Girls from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,199 places 1,269 on roll 2012/13 1,180 places 1,260 on roll 2013/14 1,223 places 1,270 on roll 2014/15 1,223 places 1,290 on roll 2015/16 1,223 places 1,308 on roll 2016/17 1,228 places 1,317 on roll 2017/18 1,223 places 1,327 on roll 2018/19 1,223 places 1,354 on roll 2020/21 1,359 places 1,368 on roll 2021/22 1,416 places 1,367 on roll 2022/23 1,395 places 1,391 on roll 2023/24 1,391 places 1,372 on roll 2024/25 1,383 places 1,381 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. Altrincham Grammar School for Girls has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Altrincham Grammar School for Girls. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
15 July 2015 No fault found ADA2864 and ADA2899

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
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Trafford

Postcode WA14 2NL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137289).

Other contested secondary schools in Trafford

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.