School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Rugby High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 110 families who named Rugby High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 150 and 249 put it first.

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

1.66

first choices for every place available

249 first preferences for 150 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Rugby High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Rugby High 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 High School 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 Rugby High School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.6 1.3 1.9 2.5 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.71 per place 210 first choices 123 places 2016/17 2.01 per place 243 first choices 121 places 2017/18 1.89 per place 223 first choices 118 places 2018/19 1.73 per place 209 first choices 121 places 2019/20 1.85 per place 216 first choices 117 places 2020/21 2.06 per place 247 first choices 120 places 2021/22 2.38 per place 285 first choices 120 places 2022/23 1.93 per place 224 first choices 116 places 2023/24 2.17 per place 262 first choices 121 places 2024/25 2.28 per place 274 first choices 120 places 2025/26 2.21 per place 265 first choices 120 places 2026/27 1.66 per place 249 first choices 150 places
First preferences per place at Rugby High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 249 first preferences for 150 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Rugby High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 123 210 113 1.71
2016/17 121 243 115 2.01
2017/18 118 223 116 1.89
2018/19 121 209 113 1.73
2019/20 117 216 111 1.85
2020/21 120 247 117 2.06
2021/22 120 285 115 2.38
2022/23 116 224 114 1.93
2023/24 121 262 113 2.17
2024/25 120 274 112 2.28
2025/26 120 265 110 2.21
2026/27 150 249 139 1.66

Places offered

150

in 2026/27

Named first choice

249

405 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

55.8%

139 of 249

Offers to families outside the council

18%

27 of 150 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Rugby High School published for 2027 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 High School, 2027 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 – Looked after children and previously looked after children who achieve the Automatic Qualifying Score or above for this school for this particular year of entry, or between one and twenty marks below the Automatic Qualifying Score, or who achieve the required minimum academic standard for admission (minimum score for a place on the waiting list), whichever is the lower. [A looked after child is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in Section 22(1) of the Children Act 1989) at the time of making an application to a school. […] criterion continues in the source document
2 – Up to 30 places will be allocated to children who were eligible for the Pupil Premium6 at the point of registering to sit the entrance test living in the Eastern Area of Warwickshire or the Priority Circle, who achieve the Automatic Qualifying Score or above for this school for this particular year of entry, or whose scores are between one and twenty marks below the Automatic Qualifying Score for this school for this particular year of entry, or who achieve the required minimum academic standard for admission (minimum score for a place on the waiting list), whichever is the lower (including any re-offers which are made from the waiting list in this criterion after 1 March 2027, provided […] criterion continues in the source document
3 – Up to 5 places will be allocated to children who were eligible for the Service Premium7 at the point of registering to sit the entrance test living in the Eastern Area of Warwickshire or the Priority Circle, who achieve the Automatic Qualifying Score or above for this school for this particular year of entry, or whose scores are between one and twenty marks below the Automatic Qualifying Score for this school, for this particular year of entry, or who achieve the required minimum academic standard for admission (minimum score for a place on the waiting list), whichever is the lower (including any re-offers which are made from the waiting list in this criterion An Education, Health and […] criterion continues in the source document
4 – Children of staff who achieve the Automatic Qualifying Score or above for this school for this particular year of entry where the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made. This will apply to all teaching and non-teaching staff on permanent contracts but excludes casual/temporary appointments (eg invigilators and peripatetic staff). […] criterion continues in the source document
5 – Children living in the Eastern Area of Warwickshire who achieve the Automatic Qualifying Score or above for this school for this particular year of entry.
6 – Children living in the Priority Circle who achieve the Automatic Qualifying Score or above for this school for this particular year of entry.
7 – If the PAN has not been reached and fewer than 30 places were offered under Criterion 2, then the balance of those 30 places will be offered to students who were eligible for the Pupil Premium (as previously defined) at the point of registering to sit the entrance test living outside the catchment areas who achieve the Automatic Qualifying Score or above for this school for this particular year of entry, or whose scores are between one and twenty marks below the Automatic Qualifying Score for this school for this particular year of entry, or who achieve the required minimum academic standa

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 2027 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 High School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

600

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

599

99.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

1

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 Rugby High 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 High School reported 1 unfilled place across Years 7 to 11, at 99.8% 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Rugby High School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 762 places 747 on roll 2011/12 770 places 764 on roll 2012/13 770 places 769 on roll 2013/14 770 places 792 on roll 2014/15 900 places 823 on roll 2015/16 869 places 839 on roll 2016/17 869 places 835 on roll 2017/18 900 places 843 on roll 2018/19 900 places 870 on roll 2020/21 900 places 903 on roll 2021/22 900 places 877 on roll 2022/23 900 places 889 on roll 2023/24 900 places 936 on roll 2024/25 900 places 930 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. Rugby High School has been the subject of 5 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in each of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Rugby High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
24 November 2021 Arrangements did not comply ADA3812
3 July 2019 Arrangements did not comply ADA3502
12 December 2018 Arrangements did not comply ADA3351
15 September 2015 Arrangements did not comply ADA2877
12 June 2014 Arrangements did not comply ADA2609

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
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Warwickshire

Postcode CV22 7RE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136595).

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.