School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Kenilworth School and Sixth Form?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 95 families who named Kenilworth School and Sixth Form as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 319 and 385 put it first.

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

1.21

first choices for every place available

385 first preferences for 319 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Kenilworth School and Sixth Form

There is no published appeal success rate for Kenilworth School and Sixth Form, 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

Kenilworth School and Sixth Form turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Kenilworth School and Sixth Form, 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 1.23 per place 329 first choices 268 places 2016/17 1.18 per place 314 first choices 266 places 2017/18 1.01 per place 273 first choices 269 places 2018/19 1.03 per place 310 first choices 301 places 2019/20 1.19 per place 321 first choices 269 places 2020/21 1.29 per place 346 first choices 268 places 2021/22 1.16 per place 311 first choices 267 places 2022/23 1.22 per place 324 first choices 266 places 2023/24 1.11 per place 326 first choices 295 places 2024/25 1.02 per place 331 first choices 323 places 2025/26 1.25 per place 397 first choices 317 places 2026/27 1.21 per place 385 first choices 319 places
First preferences per place at Kenilworth School and Sixth Form. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 385 first preferences for 319 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Kenilworth School and Sixth Form, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 268 329 247 1.23
2016/17 266 314 251 1.18
2017/18 269 273 246 1.01
2018/19 301 310 279 1.03
2019/20 269 321 257 1.19
2020/21 268 346 253 1.29
2021/22 267 311 237 1.16
2022/23 266 324 247 1.22
2023/24 295 326 270 1.11
2024/25 323 331 293 1.02
2025/26 317 397 290 1.25
2026/27 319 385 290 1.21

Places offered

319

in 2026/27

Named first choice

385

894 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75.3%

290 of 385

Offers to families outside the council

2%

5 of 319 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 125747.

How close you had to live

Kenilworth School and Sixth Form filled its places in 2025, and 4,831m — 3.00 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the ken 6 other children living outside priority area criterion.

Last place offered at

3.00 mi

4,831 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Ken 6 Other Children Living 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.

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

1,650

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,441

87.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

209

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

550

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 Kenilworth School and Sixth Form 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 Kenilworth School and Sixth Form reported 209 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Kenilworth School and Sixth Form from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,100 2,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,704 places 1,789 on roll 2010/11 1,704 places 1,741 on roll 2011/12 1,704 places 1,767 on roll 2012/13 1,704 places 1,748 on roll 2013/14 1,704 places 1,753 on roll 2014/15 1,704 places 1,790 on roll 2015/16 1,800 places 1,732 on roll 2016/17 1,800 places 1,750 on roll 2017/18 1,785 places 1,739 on roll 2018/19 1,796 places 1,773 on roll 2020/21 1,796 places 1,865 on roll 2021/22 1,796 places 1,842 on roll 2022/23 1,796 places 1,831 on roll 2023/24 1,996 places 1,859 on roll 2024/25 2,200 places 1,874 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. Kenilworth School and Sixth Form has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Kenilworth School and Sixth Form. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
22 July 2021 No fault found ADA3827

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 CV8 2AL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 146697).

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.