School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Oakley School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 30 families who named Oakley School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 170 and 171 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Warwickshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 3 years of official figures.

1.01

first choices for every place available

171 first preferences for 170 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Oakley School

There is no published appeal success rate for Oakley 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

Oakley School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 3 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 Oakley School, 2024/25 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 24/25 25/26 26/27 2024/25 1.11 per place 184 first choices 166 places 2025/26 1.09 per place 188 first choices 173 places 2026/27 1.01 per place 171 first choices 170 places
First preferences per place at Oakley School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 171 first preferences for 170 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Oakley School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2024/25 166 184 144 1.11
2025/26 173 188 153 1.09
2026/27 170 171 141 1.01

Places offered

170

in 2026/27

Named first choice

171

485 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.5%

141 of 171

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 170 offers

How close you had to live

Oakley School filled its places in 2025, and 1,176m — 0.73 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the s7 - other children (own a.a) criterion.

Last place offered at

0.73 mi

1,176 metres, 2025

Under criterion

S7 - Other Children (OWN A.A)

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

1,320

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

371

28.1% of capacity

Unfilled places

949

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 Oakley 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 Oakley School reported 949 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 28.1% 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.

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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Warwickshire

Postcode CV33 9WN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 149717).

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.