School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Alcester Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 26 families who named Alcester Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 131 and 145 put it first.

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

1.11

first choices for every place available

145 first preferences for 131 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Alcester Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Alcester 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 Warwickshire 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 Warwickshire, 20.1% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 192 of 957 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 Warwickshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Warwickshire 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

Alcester Academy turned first-choice families away in 9 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 8 of those years. In the other 1 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 Alcester Academy, 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 0.72 per place 68 first choices 94 places 2016/17 0.62 per place 82 first choices 132 places 2017/18 0.84 per place 109 first choices 130 places 2018/19 1.28 per place 171 first choices 134 places 2019/20 1.23 per place 159 first choices 129 places 2020/21 1.16 per place 152 first choices 131 places 2021/22 0.96 per place 129 first choices 134 places 2022/23 1.2 per place 155 first choices 129 places 2023/24 1.16 per place 143 first choices 123 places 2024/25 1.29 per place 161 first choices 125 places 2025/26 1.11 per place 147 first choices 132 places 2026/27 1.11 per place 145 first choices 131 places
First preferences per place at Alcester Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 145 first preferences for 131 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Alcester Academy, 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 94 68 68 0.72
2016/17 132 82 82 0.62
2017/18 130 109 107 0.84
2018/19 134 171 117 1.28
2019/20 129 159 113 1.23
2020/21 131 152 116 1.16
2021/22 134 129 105 0.96
2022/23 129 155 114 1.2
2023/24 123 143 105 1.16
2024/25 125 161 114 1.29
2025/26 132 147 116 1.11
2026/27 131 145 119 1.11

Places offered

131

in 2026/27

Named first choice

145

342 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.1%

119 of 145

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 131 offers

How close you had to live

Alcester Academy filled its places in 2025, and 5,885m — 3.66 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the s3 - in area-no sibling (la) criterion.

Last place offered at

3.66 mi

5,885 metres, 2025

Under criterion

S3 - In Area-No Sibling (LA)

as the council described it

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Warwickshire Council, allocation statistics for 2025. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Alcester 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Alcester Academy, 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, including those children 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.
2 Children living in the priority area who will have a sibling at Alcester Academy in Years 8 to 11 at the time of admission in September 2026;
3 Other children living in the priority area;
4 Children of staff employed
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 for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage as determined by a resolution of the Academy Trust (defined as a post which the school has had difficulty in filling. An example might be where the school has taken part in a recruitment drive to fill the post either across the country or worldwide and/or where the post was not filled at the first attempt).
5 Children living outside of the priority area who will have a sibling at the school at the time of admission;
6 Other children living outside of the priority area Priority Area - Alcester Academy’s priority area can be found on the Warwickshire County Council Admissions Website here. Parents can find whether they reside in Alcester Academy’s priority area by using the calculator which can be found on the Warwickshire County Council website by visiting: https://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/school-transport/nearestpriority-areaschool- calculator.

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.

Alcester 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

650

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

636

97.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

14

across Years 7 to 11

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 Alcester 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 Alcester Academy reported 14 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 97.8% 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 Alcester Academy from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 870 places 752 on roll 2012/13 870 places 702 on roll 2013/14 870 places 596 on roll 2014/15 870 places 505 on roll 2015/16 870 places 464 on roll 2016/17 650 places 469 on roll 2017/18 650 places 485 on roll 2018/19 650 places 530 on roll 2020/21 675 places 633 on roll 2021/22 675 places 634 on roll 2022/23 650 places 636 on roll 2023/24 650 places 642 on roll 2024/25 650 places 636 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. Alcester Academy has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Alcester Academy. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
13 August 2025 Arrangements did not comply ADA4428

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
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Warwickshire

Postcode B49 6QQ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137172).

Other contested secondary schools in Warwickshire

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.