School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Sale Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 98 families who named Sale Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 197 and 265 put it first.

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

1.35

first choices for every place available

265 first preferences for 197 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Sale Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Sale Grammar 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

Sale Grammar School 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 Sale Grammar School, 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 1.55 per place 300 first choices 194 places 2016/17 1.4 per place 264 first choices 189 places 2017/18 1.09 per place 210 first choices 192 places 2018/19 1.54 per place 305 first choices 198 places 2019/20 1.57 per place 310 first choices 198 places 2020/21 1.42 per place 282 first choices 199 places 2021/22 2.41 per place 463 first choices 192 places 2022/23 1.35 per place 256 first choices 189 places 2023/24 1.31 per place 251 first choices 192 places 2024/25 1.31 per place 250 first choices 191 places 2025/26 1.1 per place 213 first choices 193 places 2026/27 1.35 per place 265 first choices 197 places
First preferences per place at Sale Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 265 first preferences for 197 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Sale Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 194 300 161 1.55
2016/17 189 264 163 1.4
2017/18 192 210 144 1.09
2018/19 198 305 173 1.54
2019/20 198 310 176 1.57
2020/21 199 282 162 1.42
2021/22 192 463 146 2.41
2022/23 189 256 172 1.35
2023/24 192 251 172 1.31
2024/25 191 250 163 1.31
2025/26 193 213 138 1.1
2026/27 197 265 167 1.35

Places offered

197

in 2026/27

Named first choice

265

1,096 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

63%

167 of 265

Offers to families outside the council

11%

21 of 197 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Sale Grammar School published for 2027 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 Sale Grammar School, 2027 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 Looked After Children and all previously Looked After Children. A 'looked after child' or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangements, or special guardianship order including those who appear [to the admission authority] to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted. 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).
2 All new applicants who fulfil the entry requirements. In the event that there are more applicants in this category than places available the selection process will give priority to students with the highest Attainment 8 score. If any applicant has the same Attainment 8 score as another applicant for the final place in Categories 1 or 2, the applicant living nearest to the school as measured in a direct straight line from their permanent place of residence to the school, will be offered the place. The distance from home to school is calculated in a direct straight line from the child's permanent place of residence to the school. […] criterion continues in the source document
• no place may be available and they will be placed on a waiting list
• the Option Blocks may have been amended
• certain subject sets may be fully subscribed Under normal circumstances, no late application will be accepted after Friday 31 st August 2027.

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 2027 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.

Sale Grammar School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

954

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

962

100.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

8

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

387

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 Sale Grammar 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 Sale Grammar 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Sale Grammar School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,260 places 1,270 on roll 2011/12 1,314 places 1,259 on roll 2012/13 1,314 places 1,245 on roll 2013/14 1,482 places 1,230 on roll 2014/15 1,482 places 1,240 on roll 2015/16 1,360 places 1,235 on roll 2016/17 1,360 places 1,249 on roll 2017/18 1,341 places 1,290 on roll 2018/19 1,341 places 1,300 on roll 2020/21 1,341 places 1,305 on roll 2021/22 1,341 places 1,320 on roll 2022/23 1,341 places 1,330 on roll 2023/24 1,341 places 1,332 on roll 2024/25 1,341 places 1,351 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. Sale Grammar School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Sale Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
13 October 2021 No fault found ADA3752
12 December 2018 No fault found ADA3375

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 M33 3NH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136498).

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.