School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Calday Grange Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 22 families who named Calday Grange Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 202 and 222 put it first.

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

1.10

first choices for every place available

222 first preferences for 202 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Calday Grange Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Calday Grange Grammar 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 Wirral 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 Wirral, 26.1% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 338 of 1,293 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 Wirral.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Wirral 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

Calday Grange Grammar School turned first-choice families away in 8 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 Calday Grange Grammar 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 0.95 per place 171 first choices 180 places 2016/17 0.98 per place 184 first choices 188 places 2017/18 0.92 per place 208 first choices 225 places 2018/19 1.18 per place 241 first choices 205 places 2019/20 1.14 per place 238 first choices 208 places 2020/21 1.04 per place 212 first choices 204 places 2021/22 1.01 per place 196 first choices 195 places 2022/23 1.02 per place 211 first choices 206 places 2023/24 1.06 per place 220 first choices 208 places 2024/25 0.99 per place 191 first choices 192 places 2025/26 1.01 per place 216 first choices 213 places 2026/27 1.1 per place 222 first choices 202 places
First preferences per place at Calday Grange Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 222 first preferences for 202 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Calday Grange Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 180 171 169 0.95
2016/17 188 184 182 0.98
2017/18 225 208 207 0.92
2018/19 205 241 203 1.18
2019/20 208 238 207 1.14
2020/21 204 212 202 1.04
2021/22 195 196 192 1.01
2022/23 206 211 193 1.02
2023/24 208 220 208 1.06
2024/25 192 191 190 0.99
2025/26 213 216 212 1.01
2026/27 202 222 200 1.1

Places offered

202

in 2026/27

Named first choice

222

370 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

90.1%

200 of 222

Offers to families outside the council

11%

22 of 202 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

1,020

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,093

107.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

73

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

560

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 Calday Grange Grammar 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 Calday Grange Grammar 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Calday Grange Grammar School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,496 places 1,371 on roll 2013/14 1,442 places 1,299 on roll 2014/15 1,432 places 1,270 on roll 2015/16 1,432 places 1,309 on roll 2016/17 1,474 places 1,361 on roll 2017/18 1,458 places 1,395 on roll 2018/19 1,580 places 1,457 on roll 2020/21 1,580 places 1,513 on roll 2021/22 1,580 places 1,555 on roll 2022/23 1,580 places 1,534 on roll 2023/24 1,580 places 1,513 on roll 2024/25 1,580 places 1,479 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. Calday Grange Grammar School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Calday Grange Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
12 December 2018 No fault found ADA3374

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
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Wirral

Postcode CH48 8GG. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139144).

Other contested secondary schools in Wirral

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.