School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 45 families who named St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 156 and 201 put it first.

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

1.29

first choices for every place available

201 first preferences for 156 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College

There is no published appeal success rate for St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form 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

St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form 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 St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form 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 1.26 per place 189 first choices 150 places 2016/17 1.11 per place 171 first choices 154 places 2017/18 1.45 per place 225 first choices 155 places 2018/19 1.91 per place 309 first choices 162 places 2019/20 1.72 per place 272 first choices 158 places 2020/21 1.48 per place 233 first choices 157 places 2021/22 1.42 per place 218 first choices 154 places 2022/23 1.5 per place 233 first choices 155 places 2023/24 1.34 per place 206 first choices 154 places 2024/25 1.44 per place 225 first choices 156 places 2025/26 1.24 per place 191 first choices 154 places 2026/27 1.29 per place 201 first choices 156 places
First preferences per place at St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 201 first preferences for 156 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 150 189 143 1.26
2016/17 154 171 148 1.11
2017/18 155 225 140 1.45
2018/19 162 309 156 1.91
2019/20 158 272 152 1.72
2020/21 157 233 152 1.48
2021/22 154 218 150 1.42
2022/23 155 233 144 1.5
2023/24 154 206 143 1.34
2024/25 156 225 147 1.44
2025/26 154 191 147 1.24
2026/27 156 201 156 1.29

Places offered

156

in 2026/27

Named first choice

201

439 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

77.6%

156 of 201

Offers to families outside the council

3%

4 of 156 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 125758.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College 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 St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College, 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 Baptised Catholic children (see Note 2 below) who are looked after or previously looked after (see note 3 below)
2 Baptised Catholic children who currently attend a Catholic feeder school or academy (see Note 5
3 Baptised Catholic children who live in a feeder school or academy parish area (see Note 6
4 Other Baptised Catholic children
5 Non-Catholic children who are looked after or previously looked after (see Note 3 below)
6 Brothers and sister of non-Catholics who are attending St Thomas More Catholic School & Sixth Form College at the time of their admission (Note 4).
7 Non-Catholic children who currently attend a Catholic feeder school or academy
8 Other Non-Catholic children

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.

St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College'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

780

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

843

108.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

63

reported as full or beyond

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 St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form 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 St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at St Thomas More Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 780 places 798 on roll 2010/11 780 places 798 on roll 2011/12 780 places 874 on roll 2012/13 780 places 905 on roll 2013/14 1,030 places 908 on roll 2014/15 1,030 places 936 on roll 2015/16 1,030 places 975 on roll 2016/17 1,030 places 948 on roll 2017/18 1,030 places 966 on roll 2018/19 1,050 places 982 on roll 2020/21 1,100 places 1,069 on roll 2021/22 1,100 places 1,038 on roll 2022/23 1,030 places 1,045 on roll 2023/24 1,030 places 1,072 on roll 2024/25 1,030 places 1,095 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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Warwickshire

Postcode CV10 7EX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 141836).

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.