School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at North Leamington School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 38 families who named North Leamington School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 228 and 247 put it first.

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

1.08

first choices for every place available

247 first preferences for 228 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at North Leamington School

There is no published appeal success rate for North Leamington 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

North Leamington School turned first-choice families away in 11 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 North Leamington 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 0.86 per place 204 first choices 236 places 2016/17 1.02 per place 243 first choices 238 places 2017/18 1.13 per place 269 first choices 238 places 2018/19 1.1 per place 264 first choices 241 places 2019/20 1.23 per place 330 first choices 269 places 2020/21 1.16 per place 273 first choices 236 places 2021/22 1.1 per place 258 first choices 235 places 2022/23 1.1 per place 257 first choices 234 places 2023/24 1.14 per place 277 first choices 242 places 2024/25 1.26 per place 278 first choices 221 places 2025/26 1.29 per place 297 first choices 230 places 2026/27 1.08 per place 247 first choices 228 places
First preferences per place at North Leamington School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 247 first preferences for 228 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at North Leamington School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 236 204 186 0.86
2016/17 238 243 206 1.02
2017/18 238 269 226 1.13
2018/19 241 264 227 1.1
2019/20 269 330 249 1.23
2020/21 236 273 210 1.16
2021/22 235 258 196 1.1
2022/23 234 257 206 1.1
2023/24 242 277 221 1.14
2024/25 221 278 203 1.26
2025/26 230 297 213 1.29
2026/27 228 247 209 1.08

Places offered

228

in 2026/27

Named first choice

247

713 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

84.6%

209 of 247

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 228 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 125748.

How close you had to live

North Leamington School filled its places in 2025, and 1,996m — 1.24 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the s3 - in area-no sibling (la) criterion.

Last place offered at

1.24 mi

1,996 metres, 2025

Under criterion

S3 - In Area-No Sibling (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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria North Leamington School published for 2025 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.

Oversubscription criteria for North Leamington School, 2025 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 A copy of an adoption order, child arrangements or special guardianship order and a letter from the local authority that last looked after the child confirming that he or she was looked after immediately prior to that order being made. The catchment area for North Leamington School includes:
2 The parishes of Cubbington, Blackdown, Eathorpe, Hunningham, Offchurch, Old Milverton Westonunder-Wetherley and Bubbenhall.
3 The town of Royal Leamington Spa bounded in the south by the River Leam from the Radford Semele parish boundary to Milverton Court and following Milverton Court (excluded) and Warwick New Road (only properties on the north side are included) to the Warwick parish boundary. The western boundary follows the Warwick parish boundary to the Old Milverton parish boundary. Right to Appeal Parents have the right to appeal against North Leamington School’s decision to refuse admission. When North Leamington School informs a parent of a decision to refuse their child a place at the school, it will include: The reason why admission was refused.
4 Information about the right to appeal.
5 The deadline for lodging an appeal.
6 The contact details for making an appeal. Parents will be informed that, if they wish to appeal, they must set out their grounds for appeal in writing. North Leamington School will establish an independent appeals panel to hear the appeal. The panel will decide whether to uphold or dismiss the appeal. Where a panel upholds the appeal North Leamington School is required to admit the child. Withdrawing an offer or a place North Leamington School will withdraw an offer if:
7 It is established that the offer was obtained through a fraudulent or intentionally misleading application.
8 A parent has not responded within a reasonable period of time to the offer of a place (20 school days). During this 20 school day period the parent will be notified that the offer may be withdrawn and given an opportunity to respond and explain.
9 It has been offered in error. North Leamington School will not withdraw a place once a child has started at North Leamington School, except where that place was fraudulently obtained.

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 2025 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.

North Leamington School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,190

99.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

10

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

300

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 North Leamington 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 North Leamington School reported 10 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.2% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at North Leamington School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,500 places 1,198 on roll 2010/11 1,500 places 1,242 on roll 2011/12 1,606 places 1,241 on roll 2012/13 1,606 places 1,223 on roll 2013/14 1,606 places 1,216 on roll 2014/15 1,606 places 1,217 on roll 2015/16 1,606 places 1,299 on roll 2016/17 1,500 places 1,354 on roll 2017/18 1,500 places 1,352 on roll 2018/19 1,500 places 1,378 on roll 2020/21 1,500 places 1,464 on roll 2021/22 1,500 places 1,450 on roll 2022/23 1,500 places 1,449 on roll 2023/24 1,500 places 1,483 on roll 2024/25 1,500 places 1,466 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 CV32 6RD. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 142202).

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.