School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Mary's Catholic High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 12 families who named St Mary's Catholic High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 256 and 262 put it first.

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

1.02

first choices for every place available

262 first preferences for 256 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Mary's Catholic High School

There is no published appeal success rate for St Mary's Catholic High 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 Wigan 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 Wigan, 18.4% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 99 of 538 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 Wigan.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Wigan 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

St Mary's Catholic High School turned first-choice families away in 5 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 St Mary's Catholic High 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 1.16 per place 301 first choices 260 places 2016/17 1.06 per place 272 first choices 257 places 2017/18 0.86 per place 212 first choices 247 places 2018/19 0.93 per place 220 first choices 237 places 2019/20 0.87 per place 219 first choices 253 places 2020/21 0.98 per place 250 first choices 254 places 2021/22 0.99 per place 254 first choices 256 places 2022/23 1.15 per place 291 first choices 254 places 2023/24 0.89 per place 239 first choices 268 places 2024/25 1.02 per place 270 first choices 265 places 2025/26 0.98 per place 252 first choices 258 places 2026/27 1.02 per place 262 first choices 256 places
First preferences per place at St Mary's Catholic High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 262 first preferences for 256 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Mary's Catholic High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 260 301 258 1.16
2016/17 257 272 252 1.06
2017/18 247 212 212 0.86
2018/19 237 220 220 0.93
2019/20 253 219 219 0.87
2020/21 254 250 235 0.98
2021/22 256 254 241 0.99
2022/23 254 291 242 1.15
2023/24 268 239 239 0.89
2024/25 265 270 256 1.02
2025/26 258 252 240 0.98
2026/27 256 262 250 1.02

Places offered

256

in 2026/27

Named first choice

262

554 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

95.4%

250 of 262

Offers to families outside the council

6%

15 of 256 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

1,317

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,311

99.5% of capacity

Unfilled places

6

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

350

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 St Mary's Catholic High 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 St Mary's Catholic High School reported 6 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.5% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at St Mary's Catholic High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,599 places 1,578 on roll 2010/11 1,599 places 1,600 on roll 2011/12 1,599 places 1,611 on roll 2012/13 1,599 places 1,587 on roll 2013/14 1,610 places 1,597 on roll 2014/15 1,610 places 1,627 on roll 2015/16 1,610 places 1,619 on roll 2016/17 1,610 places 1,571 on roll 2017/18 1,610 places 1,552 on roll 2018/19 1,610 places 1,539 on roll 2020/21 1,610 places 1,558 on roll 2021/22 1,610 places 1,576 on roll 2022/23 1,610 places 1,547 on roll 2023/24 1,610 places 1,535 on roll 2024/25 1,667 places 1,554 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. St Mary's Catholic High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming St Mary's Catholic High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
14 August 2020 Arrangements did not comply ADA3713

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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Wigan

Postcode M29 7EE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 106538).

Other contested secondary schools in Wigan

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.