Refused a place at The Streetly Academy?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 64 families who named The Streetly Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 258 and 288 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Walsall actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
288 first preferences for 258 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at The Streetly Academy
There is no published appeal success rate for The Streetly Academy, 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.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
The Streetly Academy turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 10 of those years. In the other 2 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 234 | 271 | 207 | 1.16 |
| 2016/17 | 237 | 281 | 199 | 1.19 |
| 2017/18 | 244 | 339 | 219 | 1.39 |
| 2018/19 | 238 | 339 | 216 | 1.42 |
| 2019/20 | 235 | 321 | 206 | 1.37 |
| 2020/21 | 252 | 249 | 214 | 0.99 |
| 2021/22 | 240 | 281 | 223 | 1.17 |
| 2022/23 | 258 | 277 | 240 | 1.07 |
| 2023/24 | 267 | 288 | 236 | 1.08 |
| 2024/25 | 257 | 294 | 224 | 1.14 |
| 2025/26 | 259 | 255 | 224 | 0.98 |
| 2026/27 | 258 | 288 | 224 | 1.12 |
Places offered
258
in 2026/27
Named first choice
288
967 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
77.8%
224 of 288
Offers to families outside the council
41%
105 of 258 offers
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria The Streetly Academy 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Children in Public Care (Looked after children and previously looked after children). This also includes children who have been in state care outside of England. Definition: ‘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. A looked after child is a child who is (a) in the care of the Local Authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services function (see the definition section 22(1) of the Children’s Act 1989). […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 2 | Where a child has a sibling attending the Academy in years 7 to 10 when the application is made and who will be still attending the Academy at the proposed admission date. |
| 3 | Children of Staff employed at The Academy Where a member of staff has been employed at The Academy for two or more years (**) at the time at which the application for admission is made/or the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. ** All full time teaching staff All full time support staff – defined as those on a 37 week and above contract All part time teaching staff with a 45% and above timetable All part time support staff who work at least 6 hours per week for 27 weeks or more. The definition does not include contract staff. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 4 | Where the child is attending one of the following named feeder primary schools and lives within 2.5 miles of the Streetly Academy, as measured in a straight line from the centre point of the home address to the centre point of the Academy address using the Local Authority’s computerised measuring system: Blackwood Primary School, Blackwood Road, Streetly, Sutton Coldfield. Lindens Primary School, Hundred Acre Road, Streetly, Sutton Coldfield. Manor Primary School, Briar Avenue, Streetly, Sutton Coldfield. |
| 5 | Proximity of the Child's home to the Academy, with those living nearer being accorded the higher priority, the distance being measured in a straight line from the centre point of the home address to the centre point of the Academy address using the Local Authority’s computerised measuring system. Where any of the above criteria is oversubscribed, priority will be given to the applicant living closest to the Academy as set out in criterion 5. |
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.
The Streetly Academy'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
1,360
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,269
93.3% of capacity
Unfilled places
91
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
200
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 The Streetly Academy 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 The Streetly Academy reported 91 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 93.3% 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
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. Walsall does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Academy converter
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Walsall
Postcode B74 2EX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137707).
Other contested secondary schools in Walsall
- Queen Mary's Grammar School 2.06 first choices per place
- Walsall Academy 1.85 first choices per place
- Queen Mary's High School 1.77 first choices per place
- Barr Beacon School 1.26 first choices per place
- St Francis of Assisi Catholic College 1.25 first choices per place
- Ormiston Shelfield Community Academy 1.08 first choices per place
- St Thomas More Catholic School, Willenhall 1.06 first choices per place
- Brownhills Ormiston Academy 0.88 first choices per place
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.