School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Stratford Upon Avon School?

In 2026/27, Stratford Upon Avon School offered 349 places and 242 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.69

first choices for every place available

242 first preferences for 349 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Stratford Upon Avon School

There is no published appeal success rate for Stratford Upon Avon 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 Upon Avon School turned first-choice families away in 3 of the last 12 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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 Stratford Upon Avon School, 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 0.68 per place 163 first choices 239 places 2016/17 0.59 per place 151 first choices 256 places 2017/18 0.73 per place 172 first choices 237 places 2018/19 0.81 per place 236 first choices 292 places 2019/20 0.6 per place 208 first choices 348 places 2020/21 0.67 per place 212 first choices 317 places 2021/22 0.58 per place 184 first choices 315 places 2022/23 0.85 per place 269 first choices 317 places 2023/24 0.85 per place 283 first choices 334 places 2024/25 0.85 per place 293 first choices 344 places 2025/26 0.85 per place 292 first choices 345 places 2026/27 0.69 per place 242 first choices 349 places
First preferences per place at Stratford Upon Avon School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 242 first preferences for 349 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Stratford Upon Avon School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 239 163 163 0.68
2016/17 256 151 150 0.59
2017/18 237 172 172 0.73
2018/19 292 236 236 0.81
2019/20 348 208 208 0.6
2020/21 317 212 211 0.67
2021/22 315 184 182 0.58
2022/23 317 269 236 0.85
2023/24 334 283 251 0.85
2024/25 344 293 260 0.85
2025/26 345 292 263 0.85
2026/27 349 242 242 0.69

Places offered

349

in 2026/27

Named first choice

242

599 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

242 of 242

Offers to families outside the council

1%

3 of 344 offers

How close you had to live

Stratford Upon Avon School filled its places in 2025, and 8,296m — 5.15 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the s5 - other children (la) criterion.

Last place offered at

5.15 mi

8,296 metres, 2025

Under criterion

S5 - Other Children (LA)

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

1,450

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,628

112.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

178

reported as full or beyond

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 Stratford Upon Avon 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 Upon Avon 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 Upon Avon School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,050 2,100 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,750 places 1,485 on roll 2012/13 1,750 places 1,468 on roll 2013/14 1,750 places 1,438 on roll 2014/15 1,750 places 1,388 on roll 2015/16 1,750 places 1,377 on roll 2016/17 1,750 places 1,374 on roll 2017/18 1,750 places 1,357 on roll 2018/19 1,750 places 1,427 on roll 2020/21 1,750 places 1,598 on roll 2021/22 1,750 places 1,646 on roll 2022/23 1,750 places 1,742 on roll 2023/24 2,050 places 1,821 on roll 2024/25 1,750 places 1,894 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 CV37 9DH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137236).

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.