School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Queen Elizabeth Academy?

In 2026/27, The Queen Elizabeth Academy offered 153 places and 148 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.

0.97

first choices for every place available

148 first preferences for 153 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Queen Elizabeth Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for The Queen Elizabeth Academy, 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 Queen Elizabeth Academy turned first-choice families away in 7 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 Queen Elizabeth Academy, 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 0.8 per place 71 first choices 89 places 2016/17 0.82 per place 90 first choices 110 places 2017/18 0.95 per place 112 first choices 118 places 2018/19 1 per place 130 first choices 130 places 2019/20 1.33 per place 199 first choices 150 places 2020/21 1.2 per place 140 first choices 117 places 2021/22 1.02 per place 149 first choices 146 places 2022/23 1.29 per place 193 first choices 150 places 2023/24 1.13 per place 180 first choices 159 places 2024/25 1.15 per place 184 first choices 160 places 2025/26 1.02 per place 164 first choices 160 places 2026/27 0.97 per place 148 first choices 153 places
First preferences per place at The Queen Elizabeth Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 148 first preferences for 153 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Queen Elizabeth Academy, 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 89 71 71 0.8
2016/17 110 90 89 0.82
2017/18 118 112 110 0.95
2018/19 130 130 120 1
2019/20 150 199 145 1.33
2020/21 117 140 115 1.2
2021/22 146 149 132 1.02
2022/23 150 193 148 1.29
2023/24 159 180 148 1.13
2024/25 160 184 150 1.15
2025/26 160 164 156 1.02
2026/27 153 148 148 0.97

Places offered

153

in 2026/27

Named first choice

148

299 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

148 of 148

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 153 offers

How close you had to live

The Queen Elizabeth Academy filled its places in 2025, and 6,267m — 3.89 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the tqea 5 other children by distance from the academy criterion.

Last place offered at

3.89 mi

6,267 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Tqea 5 Other Children By Distance From The Academy

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

660

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

720

109.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

60

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 Queen Elizabeth Academy 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 Queen Elizabeth Academy 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, 2014/15 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Queen Elizabeth Academy from 2014/15 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2014/15 876 places 530 on roll 2015/16 876 places 519 on roll 2016/17 600 places 556 on roll 2017/18 600 places 591 on roll 2018/19 600 places 620 on roll 2020/21 660 places 654 on roll 2021/22 660 places 677 on roll 2022/23 660 places 697 on roll 2023/24 660 places 713 on roll 2024/25 660 places 720 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Warwickshire

Postcode CV9 1LZ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139937).

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.