Refused a place at Ashlawn School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 30 families who named Ashlawn School as their first choice did not get a place: 186 put it first and 156 of them were offered one.
Below: what an appeal in Warwickshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27
186 first preferences for 245 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Ashlawn School
There is no published appeal success rate for Ashlawn 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 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.
- 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
Ashlawn School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 8 of those years. In the other 4 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 | 250 | 364 | 139 | 1.46 |
| 2016/17 | 249 | 328 | 139 | 1.32 |
| 2017/18 | 262 | 376 | 147 | 1.44 |
| 2018/19 | 258 | 403 | 148 | 1.56 |
| 2019/20 | 288 | 355 | 182 | 1.23 |
| 2020/21 | 280 | 361 | 186 | 1.29 |
| 2021/22 | 253 | 317 | 153 | 1.25 |
| 2022/23 | 284 | 327 | 241 | 1.15 |
| 2023/24 | 249 | 245 | 178 | 0.98 |
| 2024/25 | 246 | 184 | 160 | 0.75 |
| 2025/26 | 282 | 172 | 153 | 0.61 |
| 2026/27 | 245 | 186 | 156 | 0.76 |
Places offered
245
in 2026/27
Named first choice
186
875 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
83.9%
156 of 186
Offers to families outside the council
6%
14 of 245 offers
How close you had to live
Ashlawn School filled its places in 2025, and 17,801m — 11.06 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the (ash) cat 8: other children criterion.
Last place offered at
11.06 mi
17,801 metres, 2025
Under criterion
(ASH) Cat 8: Other Children
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 Ashlawn 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Children who, at the time of admission, are in care of a local authority or are provided with accommodation by the authority (looked after children). Also, children who were previously looked after but ceased to be so because they were adopted, or became subject to child arrangements order or a special guardianship order 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 A looked-after child is defined in Section 22 of the Children Act 1989 |
| 2 | Other children requesting a place at the school. Where there is a need to prioritise applicants within a criteria, places will then be offered in accordance with distance between the students home and the school (shortest distance = highest priority). Distance will be calculated by the straight line measurement from the home address point location coordinate of the applicant’s home address (as set by the Ordnance Survey) to the centre point of the school. All distances are subject to changes which may occur with updates of mapping data. This applies equally to those living inside and outside the county’s boundary. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 3 | The applicant meets the relevant qualifying standards; and |
| 4 | There is place on the course or courses preferred by the applicant Out of Age Admissions - Where an applicant wishes to be placed in a year group outside that which would generally be appropriate for their chronological age, they should initially contact the school to discuss the application and present any relevant evidence to support the request. The admission authority (TLET) will consider all such applications in line with the requirements of the Schools Admissions Code Waiting List - The admission authority will hold a waiting list for admission to year 12 until the end of the autumn term following the September admission point. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 5 | It is the responsibility of the Board of Trustees, and those to whom they delegate authority, to ensure that the principles and procedures of this policy are adhered to. The use of this policy will be subject to routine monitoring to ensure its fidelity in practice. |
| 6 | This policy has been equality impact assessed and we believe that it is in line with the Equality Act 2010 as it is fair, it does not prioritise or disadvantage any individual (with due regard to their protected characteristics), and it helps to promote equality across the Trust. 9 - Further contact Helpful contact details – If you have any queries arising from the policy, would like this document in a more accessible format or require support with your application, please use the following contact details: |
| ● Warwickshire Admissions Service https://forms.office.com/pages/response |
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.
Ashlawn 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
1,460
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,274
87.3% of capacity
Unfilled places
186
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
400
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 Ashlawn 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 Ashlawn School reported 186 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 87.3% 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
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. Ashlawn School has been the subject of 3 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in 2 of them.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 10 August 2023 | Arrangements did not comply | ADA4131 |
| 13 October 2021 | Arrangements did not comply | REF3885 |
| 20 November 2015 | No fault found | ADA3261 and ADA2988 |
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
- Whether this year's cut-off will be the same. The distance above is last year's and it moves with whoever applies — it is not a boundary you can be measured against in advance, and no council publishes next year's — 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
- Warwickshire
Postcode CV22 5ET. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136587).
Other contested secondary schools in Warwickshire
- King Edward VI School 2.54 first choices per place
- Stratford Girls' Grammar School 2.41 first choices per place
- Lawrence Sheriff School 2.13 first choices per place
- Alcester Grammar School 1.97 first choices per place
- Rugby High School 1.66 first choices per place
- Rugby Free Secondary School 1.39 first choices per place
- St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College 1.29 first choices per place
- Kenilworth School and Sixth Form 1.21 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.