School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Southam College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 60 families who named Southam College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 256 and 297 put it first.

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

1.16

first choices for every place available

297 first preferences for 256 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Southam College

There is no published appeal success rate for Southam College, 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

Southam College 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 Southam College, 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 1.47 per place 333 first choices 227 places 2016/17 1.24 per place 325 first choices 262 places 2017/18 1.28 per place 344 first choices 268 places 2018/19 1.19 per place 319 first choices 269 places 2019/20 1.17 per place 316 first choices 269 places 2020/21 1.06 per place 284 first choices 267 places 2021/22 1.01 per place 271 first choices 269 places 2022/23 1.17 per place 315 first choices 270 places 2023/24 1.17 per place 307 first choices 263 places 2024/25 1.15 per place 307 first choices 266 places 2025/26 1.13 per place 297 first choices 262 places 2026/27 1.16 per place 297 first choices 256 places
First preferences per place at Southam College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 297 first preferences for 256 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Southam College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 227 333 218 1.47
2016/17 262 325 225 1.24
2017/18 268 344 253 1.28
2018/19 269 319 261 1.19
2019/20 269 316 257 1.17
2020/21 267 284 250 1.06
2021/22 269 271 234 1.01
2022/23 270 315 254 1.17
2023/24 263 307 253 1.17
2024/25 266 307 252 1.15
2025/26 262 297 253 1.13
2026/27 256 297 237 1.16

Places offered

256

in 2026/27

Named first choice

297

513 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

79.8%

237 of 297

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 256 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 125738.

How close you had to live

Southam College filled its places in 2025, and 5,097m — 3.17 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the s5 - attend partner (own a.a) criterion.

Last place offered at

3.17 mi

5,097 metres, 2025

Under criterion

S5 - Attend Partner (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

1,350

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,339

99.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

11

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 Southam College 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 Southam College reported 11 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 Southam College 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 1,077 places 1,210 on roll 2010/11 1,077 places 1,249 on roll 2011/12 1,224 places 1,320 on roll 2012/13 1,224 places 1,379 on roll 2013/14 1,224 places 1,369 on roll 2014/15 1,224 places 1,454 on roll 2015/16 1,666 places 1,578 on roll 2016/17 1,666 places 1,647 on roll 2017/18 1,650 places 1,643 on roll 2018/19 1,650 places 1,660 on roll 2020/21 1,650 places 1,649 on roll 2021/22 1,650 places 1,649 on roll 2022/23 1,650 places 1,657 on roll 2023/24 1,650 places 1,657 on roll 2024/25 1,650 places 1,621 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 CV47 0JW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 143905).

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.