School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 32 families who named The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts College as their first choice did not get a place: 199 put it first and 167 of them were offered one.

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

32

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

199 first preferences for 208 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts College

There is no published appeal success rate for The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts 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

The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts College turned first-choice families away in 9 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 3 of those years. In the other 6 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — 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 The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts 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 0.77 per place 165 first choices 213 places 2016/17 1.01 per place 237 first choices 234 places 2017/18 1.06 per place 231 first choices 218 places 2018/19 0.94 per place 207 first choices 220 places 2019/20 0.89 per place 203 first choices 229 places 2020/21 1.03 per place 233 first choices 227 places 2021/22 0.96 per place 210 first choices 219 places 2022/23 0.81 per place 184 first choices 227 places 2023/24 0.83 per place 185 first choices 222 places 2024/25 0.92 per place 197 first choices 213 places 2025/26 0.96 per place 207 first choices 215 places 2026/27 0.96 per place 199 first choices 208 places
First preferences per place at The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 199 first preferences for 208 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 213 165 153 0.77
2016/17 234 237 186 1.01
2017/18 218 231 176 1.06
2018/19 220 207 180 0.94
2019/20 229 203 177 0.89
2020/21 227 233 179 1.03
2021/22 219 210 167 0.96
2022/23 227 184 181 0.81
2023/24 222 185 170 0.83
2024/25 213 197 177 0.92
2025/26 215 207 167 0.96
2026/27 208 199 167 0.96

Places offered

208

in 2026/27

Named first choice

199

512 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

83.9%

167 of 199

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 208 offers

How close you had to live

The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts College filled its places in 2025, and 10,982m — 6.82 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the (avon) cat 5: in area - no sibling criterion.

Last place offered at

6.82 mi

10,982 metres, 2025

Under criterion

(AVON) Cat 5: In Area - No Sibling

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

1,100

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,122

102% of capacity

Over its capacity by

22

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

0

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 The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts 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 The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts 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 The Avon Valley School and Performing Arts College from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,100 places 1,104 on roll 2010/11 1,100 places 1,105 on roll 2011/12 1,100 places 1,106 on roll 2012/13 1,100 places 1,100 on roll 2013/14 1,100 places 1,105 on roll 2014/15 1,100 places 1,095 on roll 2015/16 1,100 places 1,089 on roll 2016/17 1,100 places 1,080 on roll 2017/18 1,100 places 1,089 on roll 2018/19 1,100 places 1,094 on roll 2020/21 1,100 places 1,099 on roll 2021/22 1,100 places 1,095 on roll 2022/23 1,100 places 1,096 on roll 2023/24 1,100 places 1,108 on roll 2024/25 1,100 places 1,122 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
Foundation school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Warwickshire

Postcode CV21 1EH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 125764).

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.