School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Houlton School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 30 families who named Houlton School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 172 and 179 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Warwickshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 5 years of official figures.

1.04

first choices for every place available

179 first preferences for 172 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Houlton School

There is no published appeal success rate for Houlton 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

Houlton School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 5 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 4 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 Houlton School, 2022/23 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 22/23 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2022/23 1.03 per place 177 first choices 172 places 2023/24 1.27 per place 223 first choices 175 places 2024/25 1.12 per place 192 first choices 171 places 2025/26 0.93 per place 169 first choices 182 places 2026/27 1.04 per place 179 first choices 172 places
First preferences per place at Houlton School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 179 first preferences for 172 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Houlton School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2022/23 172 177 134 1.03
2023/24 175 223 152 1.27
2024/25 171 192 141 1.12
2025/26 182 169 147 0.93
2026/27 172 179 149 1.04

Places offered

172

in 2026/27

Named first choice

179

630 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

83.2%

149 of 179

Offers to families outside the council

10%

18 of 172 offers

How close you had to live

Houlton School filled its places in 2025, and 4,929m — 3.06 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the houl cat6 other children criterion.

Last place offered at

3.06 mi

4,929 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Houl Cat6 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.

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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

711

79% of capacity

Unfilled places

189

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 Houlton 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 Houlton School reported 189 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 79% 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, 2021/22 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Houlton School from 2021/22 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2021/22 900 places 179 on roll 2022/23 900 places 354 on roll 2023/24 900 places 538 on roll 2024/25 900 places 711 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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Warwickshire

Postcode CV23 1ED. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 143707).

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.