School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Polesworth School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 1 families who named The Polesworth School as their first choice did not get a place: 238 put it first and 237 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.

1

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

238 first preferences for 243 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Polesworth School

There is no published appeal success rate for The Polesworth 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

The Polesworth School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at The Polesworth 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 1.07 per place 285 first choices 267 places 2016/17 1.21 per place 325 first choices 269 places 2017/18 1.24 per place 278 first choices 224 places 2018/19 1.09 per place 262 first choices 240 places 2019/20 1.26 per place 276 first choices 219 places 2020/21 1.14 per place 272 first choices 238 places 2021/22 1.15 per place 309 first choices 268 places 2022/23 1.15 per place 273 first choices 237 places 2023/24 1.07 per place 247 first choices 231 places 2024/25 1.11 per place 264 first choices 237 places 2025/26 1.01 per place 237 first choices 235 places 2026/27 0.98 per place 238 first choices 243 places
First preferences per place at The Polesworth School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 238 first preferences for 243 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Polesworth School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 267 285 265 1.07
2016/17 269 325 263 1.21
2017/18 224 278 222 1.24
2018/19 240 262 230 1.09
2019/20 219 276 216 1.26
2020/21 238 272 228 1.14
2021/22 268 309 264 1.15
2022/23 237 273 232 1.15
2023/24 231 247 223 1.07
2024/25 237 264 230 1.11
2025/26 235 237 227 1.01
2026/27 243 238 237 0.98

Places offered

243

in 2026/27

Named first choice

238

377 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

99.6%

237 of 238

Offers to families outside the council

15%

36 of 242 offers

How close you had to live

The Polesworth School filled its places in 2025, and 3,751m — 2.33 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the polesworth 7 other children criterion.

Last place offered at

2.33 mi

3,751 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Polesworth 7 Other Children

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

1,220

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,235

101.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

15

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 The Polesworth 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 The Polesworth 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Polesworth School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,420 places 1,460 on roll 2011/12 1,420 places 1,476 on roll 2012/13 1,420 places 1,481 on roll 2013/14 1,420 places 1,473 on roll 2014/15 1,420 places 1,462 on roll 2015/16 1,470 places 1,456 on roll 2016/17 1,470 places 1,523 on roll 2017/18 1,470 places 1,552 on roll 2018/19 1,550 places 1,508 on roll 2020/21 1,520 places 1,523 on roll 2021/22 1,520 places 1,518 on roll 2022/23 1,520 places 1,459 on roll 2023/24 1,520 places 1,460 on roll 2024/25 1,520 places 1,439 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 B78 1QT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136459).

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.