Refused a place at Higham Lane North Academy?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 20 families who named Higham Lane North Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 142 and 158 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Warwickshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 1 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
158 first preferences for 142 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Higham Lane North Academy
There is no published appeal success rate for Higham Lane North 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.
- 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
Higham Lane North Academy turned first-choice families away in its first and only year of published figures. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
Only one year of published figures exist for this school, so there is nothing to plot yet. The figures themselves are below.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026/27 | 142 | 158 | 138 | 1.11 |
Places offered
142
in 2026/27
Named first choice
158
436 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
87.3%
138 of 158
Offers to families outside the council
3%
4 of 142 offers
How close you had to live
Higham Lane North Academy filled its places in 2025, and 6,433m — 4.00 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the higham lane north 5 outside priority area criterion.
Last place offered at
4.00 mi
6,433 metres, 2025
Under criterion
Higham Lane North 5 Outside Priority Area
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.
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
- Free schools
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Warwickshire
Postcode CV11 6YN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 151700).
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.