School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Stratford Girls' Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 177 families who named Stratford Girls' Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 120 and 289 put it first.

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

2.41

first choices for every place available

289 first preferences for 120 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Stratford Girls' Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Stratford Girls' Grammar 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

Stratford Girls' Grammar 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 Stratford Girls' Grammar School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.8 1.5 2.3 3.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 2.07 per place 232 first choices 112 places 2016/17 2.11 per place 253 first choices 120 places 2017/18 1.93 per place 231 first choices 120 places 2018/19 1.82 per place 215 first choices 118 places 2019/20 1.63 per place 194 first choices 119 places 2020/21 2.2 per place 266 first choices 121 places 2021/22 2.53 per place 298 first choices 118 places 2022/23 2.08 per place 250 first choices 120 places 2023/24 2.36 per place 271 first choices 115 places 2024/25 2.17 per place 256 first choices 118 places 2025/26 2.34 per place 281 first choices 120 places 2026/27 2.41 per place 289 first choices 120 places
First preferences per place at Stratford Girls' Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 289 first preferences for 120 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Stratford Girls' Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 112 232 105 2.07
2016/17 120 253 115 2.11
2017/18 120 231 115 1.93
2018/19 118 215 115 1.82
2019/20 119 194 107 1.63
2020/21 121 266 111 2.2
2021/22 118 298 112 2.53
2022/23 120 250 118 2.08
2023/24 115 271 105 2.36
2024/25 118 256 115 2.17
2025/26 120 281 113 2.34
2026/27 120 289 112 2.41

Places offered

120

in 2026/27

Named first choice

289

435 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

38.8%

112 of 289

Offers to families outside the council

40%

48 of 120 offers

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

600

100% of capacity

Unfilled places

0

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 Stratford Girls' Grammar 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 Stratford Girls' Grammar School 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Stratford Girls' Grammar School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 578 places 597 on roll 2012/13 578 places 625 on roll 2013/14 578 places 651 on roll 2014/15 578 places 678 on roll 2015/16 850 places 730 on roll 2016/17 850 places 781 on roll 2017/18 850 places 807 on roll 2018/19 850 places 820 on roll 2020/21 850 places 781 on roll 2021/22 850 places 817 on roll 2022/23 850 places 822 on roll 2023/24 850 places 815 on roll 2024/25 850 places 831 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. Stratford Girls' Grammar School has been the subject of 3 such determinations. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Stratford Girls' Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
24 November 2021 No fault found ADA3873
13 October 2020 No fault found ADA3662
11 October 2019 No fault found ADA3616

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 CV37 9HA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137235).

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.