School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Higham Lane School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 8 families who named Higham Lane School as their first choice did not get a place: 217 put it first and 209 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.

8

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

217 first preferences for 248 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Higham Lane School

There is no published appeal success rate for Higham Lane 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.

How contested this school has been

Higham Lane School turned first-choice families away in 10 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Higham Lane 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 1.17 per place 283 first choices 241 places 2016/17 1.18 per place 286 first choices 242 places 2017/18 1.37 per place 334 first choices 243 places 2018/19 1.25 per place 307 first choices 246 places 2019/20 1.12 per place 273 first choices 244 places 2020/21 1.08 per place 262 first choices 243 places 2021/22 1.17 per place 285 first choices 243 places 2022/23 1.21 per place 292 first choices 241 places 2023/24 1.33 per place 316 first choices 238 places 2024/25 1.23 per place 298 first choices 242 places 2025/26 0.79 per place 177 first choices 225 places 2026/27 0.88 per place 217 first choices 248 places
First preferences per place at Higham Lane School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 217 first preferences for 248 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Higham Lane School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 241 283 233 1.17
2016/17 242 286 232 1.18
2017/18 243 334 236 1.37
2018/19 246 307 238 1.25
2019/20 244 273 238 1.12
2020/21 243 262 232 1.08
2021/22 243 285 231 1.17
2022/23 241 292 233 1.21
2023/24 238 316 232 1.33
2024/25 242 298 230 1.23
2025/26 225 177 176 0.79
2026/27 248 217 209 0.88

Places offered

248

in 2026/27

Named first choice

217

627 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

96.3%

209 of 217

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 248 offers

How close you had to live

Higham Lane School filled its places in 2025, and 17,746m — 11.03 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the s5 - other children (la) criterion.

Last place offered at

11.03 mi

17,746 metres, 2025

Under criterion

S5 - Other Children (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.

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

1,290

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,241

96.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

49

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 Higham Lane 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 Higham Lane School reported 49 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 96.2% 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 Higham Lane 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 1,190 places 1,213 on roll 2012/13 1,190 places 1,212 on roll 2013/14 1,190 places 1,208 on roll 2014/15 1,230 places 1,227 on roll 2015/16 1,230 places 1,228 on roll 2016/17 1,530 places 1,320 on roll 2017/18 1,530 places 1,394 on roll 2018/19 1,530 places 1,408 on roll 2020/21 1,530 places 1,442 on roll 2021/22 1,530 places 1,444 on roll 2022/23 1,490 places 1,426 on roll 2023/24 1,490 places 1,425 on roll 2024/25 1,490 places 1,469 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
Warwickshire

Postcode CV10 0BJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137767).

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.