School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Flixton Girls School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 25 families who named Flixton Girls School as their first choice did not get a place: 199 put it first and 174 of them were offered one.

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

25

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

199 first preferences for 207 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Flixton Girls School

There is no published appeal success rate for Flixton Girls 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 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

Flixton Girls School turned first-choice families away in 9 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 1 of those years. In the other 8 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at Flixton Girls 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 0.8 per place 153 first choices 192 places 2016/17 0.95 per place 164 first choices 172 places 2017/18 0.97 per place 173 first choices 179 places 2018/19 1.15 per place 206 first choices 179 places 2019/20 0.9 per place 167 first choices 185 places 2020/21 0.87 per place 166 first choices 190 places 2021/22 0.72 per place 136 first choices 188 places 2022/23 0.87 per place 167 first choices 192 places 2023/24 0.94 per place 203 first choices 216 places 2024/25 0.89 per place 175 first choices 197 places 2025/26 0.81 per place 166 first choices 205 places 2026/27 0.96 per place 199 first choices 207 places
First preferences per place at Flixton Girls School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 199 first preferences for 207 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Flixton Girls School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 192 153 137 0.8
2016/17 172 164 127 0.95
2017/18 179 173 133 0.97
2018/19 179 206 150 1.15
2019/20 185 167 147 0.9
2020/21 190 166 145 0.87
2021/22 188 136 125 0.72
2022/23 192 167 148 0.87
2023/24 216 203 181 0.94
2024/25 197 175 163 0.89
2025/26 205 166 166 0.81
2026/27 207 199 174 0.96

Places offered

207

in 2026/27

Named first choice

199

387 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

87.4%

174 of 199

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 207 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Flixton Girls School published for 2025 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 Flixton Girls School, 2025 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 A 'looked after child' or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, residence, or special guardianship order. A looked after child is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in section 22(1) of the Children Act 1989). This includes children who appear to the Admission Authority to have been in state care outside of England but ceased to be so as a result of being adopted. […] criterion continues in the source document
2 Children of staff at the school in either or both of the following circumstances: a) where the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, and/or b) the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post at the school for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage.
3 Children who will have a sibling attending the school (up to and including year 13) at the time of the applicant’s proposed admission. If the sibling intends to attend the sixth form, and in the event chose not to enrol for the sixth form, the place would be withdrawn. (This includes half/step/adopted/foster sisters and any other children living at the same address as part of the same family unit).
4 Children who live in the catchment area of the school.
5 Children who live nearest to the school, measured in a direct straight line from the home address of the child’s permanent place of residence to the main entrance of the school. If there are more applicants than can be accommodated at the school in criteria 1-5, places will be offered to those children in each criteria whose place of residence is nearest to the school as defined in criterion 5. This will be measured using property co-ordinates provided through a combination of the Trafford Local Land and Property Gazetteer (BS7666), other Local Authority’s and Royal Mail Postal Address Information. […] criterion continues in the source document

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 2025 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.

Flixton Girls School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

956

106.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

56

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 Flixton Girls 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 Flixton Girls 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 Flixton Girls School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,000 places 827 on roll 2012/13 960 places 772 on roll 2013/14 843 places 777 on roll 2014/15 930 places 803 on roll 2015/16 930 places 805 on roll 2016/17 900 places 840 on roll 2017/18 900 places 900 on roll 2018/19 900 places 924 on roll 2020/21 900 places 931 on roll 2021/22 900 places 931 on roll 2022/23 900 places 929 on roll 2023/24 900 places 946 on roll 2024/25 900 places 956 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
Trafford

Postcode M41 5DR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136965).

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.