School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Barr Beacon School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 107 families who named Barr Beacon School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 264 and 333 put it first.

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

1.26

first choices for every place available

333 first preferences for 264 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Barr Beacon School

There is no published appeal success rate for Barr Beacon 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 Walsall 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 Walsall, 17.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 182 of 1,059 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 Walsall.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Walsall 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

Barr Beacon 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 Barr Beacon 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 1.02 per place 252 first choices 248 places 2016/17 1.09 per place 267 first choices 245 places 2017/18 1.19 per place 295 first choices 248 places 2018/19 1.1 per place 326 first choices 296 places 2019/20 1.49 per place 373 first choices 251 places 2020/21 1.26 per place 344 first choices 273 places 2021/22 1.29 per place 349 first choices 270 places 2022/23 1.36 per place 348 first choices 255 places 2023/24 1.38 per place 347 first choices 252 places 2024/25 1.24 per place 314 first choices 254 places 2025/26 1.25 per place 319 first choices 255 places 2026/27 1.26 per place 333 first choices 264 places
First preferences per place at Barr Beacon School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 333 first preferences for 264 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Barr Beacon School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 248 252 182 1.02
2016/17 245 267 183 1.09
2017/18 248 295 187 1.19
2018/19 296 326 220 1.1
2019/20 251 373 198 1.49
2020/21 273 344 237 1.26
2021/22 270 349 224 1.29
2022/23 255 348 213 1.36
2023/24 252 347 221 1.38
2024/25 254 314 201 1.24
2025/26 255 319 228 1.25
2026/27 264 333 226 1.26

Places offered

264

in 2026/27

Named first choice

333

1,205 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

67.9%

226 of 333

Offers to families outside the council

27%

72 of 264 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Barr Beacon School 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 Barr Beacon School, 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 in Public Care (looked after children) and previously looked after children Definition: 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.
2 Where a child has an older sibling currently attending the school when the application is made and who will be still attending the school in Years 8 – 11 in September of the relevant year. Siblings of Sixth Form students DO NOT qualify for a sibling claim.

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.

Barr Beacon School'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

1,300

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,291

99.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

9

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

187

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 Barr Beacon 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 Barr Beacon School reported 9 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.3% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Barr Beacon School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,487 places 1,497 on roll 2012/13 1,487 places 1,501 on roll 2013/14 1,487 places 1,519 on roll 2014/15 1,496 places 1,512 on roll 2015/16 1,487 places 1,506 on roll 2016/17 1,487 places 1,489 on roll 2017/18 1,487 places 1,524 on roll 2018/19 1,500 places 1,579 on roll 2020/21 1,500 places 1,551 on roll 2021/22 1,487 places 1,570 on roll 2022/23 1,487 places 1,580 on roll 2023/24 1,487 places 1,549 on roll 2024/25 1,487 places 1,497 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
Walsall

Postcode WS9 0RF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136885).

Other contested secondary schools in Walsall

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.