School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Rugby Free Secondary School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 88 families who named Rugby Free Secondary School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 168 and 234 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Warwickshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 10 years of official figures.

1.39

first choices for every place available

234 first preferences for 168 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Rugby Free Secondary School

There is no published appeal success rate for Rugby Free Secondary 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

Rugby Free Secondary School turned first-choice families away in 6 of the last 10 years. More families named it first than it had places in 4 of those years. In the other 2 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 Rugby Free Secondary School, 2017/18 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 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2017/18 0.36 per place 62 first choices 170 places 2018/19 0.7 per place 124 first choices 178 places 2019/20 1.02 per place 183 first choices 179 places 2020/21 0.42 per place 67 first choices 160 places 2021/22 0.52 per place 79 first choices 153 places 2022/23 0.71 per place 120 first choices 168 places 2023/24 0.86 per place 171 first choices 198 places 2024/25 1.28 per place 207 first choices 162 places 2025/26 1.61 per place 278 first choices 173 places 2026/27 1.39 per place 234 first choices 168 places
First preferences per place at Rugby Free Secondary School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 234 first preferences for 168 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Rugby Free Secondary School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2017/18 170 62 62 0.36
2018/19 178 124 108 0.7
2019/20 179 183 128 1.02
2020/21 160 67 67 0.42
2021/22 153 79 79 0.52
2022/23 168 120 120 0.71
2023/24 198 171 149 0.86
2024/25 162 207 137 1.28
2025/26 173 278 150 1.61
2026/27 168 234 146 1.39

Places offered

168

in 2026/27

Named first choice

234

832 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

62.4%

146 of 234

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 167 offers

How close you had to live

Rugby Free Secondary School filled its places in 2025, and 1,674m — 1.04 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the s6 - other children (own a.a) criterion.

Last place offered at

1.04 mi

1,674 metres, 2025

Under criterion

S6 - 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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Rugby Free Secondary School published for 2026 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 Rugby Free Secondary School, 2026 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 Children in Care or Children Previously in Care This category includes children in the care of the Local Authority as defined under section 22 of the Children Act 1989 or children who have previously been looked after and immediately after being looked after became subject to adoption, residence or a special guardianship order. Applications made under this criterion must be accompanied by details of circumstance and professionally supported evidence.
2 Children with a sibling at the school at the time of admission. The term ‘sibling’ includes an adopted, half or stepchild permanently living in the same family unit or a foster child permanently living in the same family unit whose place has been arranged by the social service department of the Local Authority.
3 Where the prospective student is the child of a permanent member of staff at Triumph Learning Trust, who has been employed for a period of more than one academic year at the time when the application is made.
4 Children attending a Triumph Learning Trust feeder school.
5 Proximity to the school. This will be measured in a straight line from the Address Point of the child’s home (OS Address Point) to the Address Point of the school site using GIS software. A priority area map for schools in Warwickshire can be found here.

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 2026 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.

Rugby Free Secondary School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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

1,050

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

896

85.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

154

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

250

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 Rugby Free Secondary 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 Rugby Free Secondary School reported 154 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 85.3% 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, 2016/17 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Rugby Free Secondary School from 2016/17 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 16/17 17/18 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2016/17 1,050 places 143 on roll 2017/18 1,100 places 329 on roll 2018/19 1,470 places 530 on roll 2020/21 1,470 places 862 on roll 2021/22 1,470 places 876 on roll 2022/23 1,470 places 985 on roll 2023/24 1,470 places 1,087 on roll 2024/25 1,300 places 1,107 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 CV22 5PE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 142881).

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.