School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Holy Trinity School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 15 families who named Holy Trinity School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 28 and 39 put it first.

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

1.39

first choices for every place available

39 first preferences for 28 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Holy Trinity School

There is no published appeal success rate for Holy Trinity 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 Worcestershire 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 Worcestershire, 19.7% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 90 of 458 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 Worcestershire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Worcestershire 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

Holy Trinity 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 Holy Trinity 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 1.48 per place 37 first choices 25 places 2016/17 1.39 per place 32 first choices 23 places 2017/18 1.24 per place 31 first choices 25 places 2018/19 1.12 per place 28 first choices 25 places 2019/20 1.31 per place 34 first choices 26 places 2020/21 0.87 per place 20 first choices 23 places 2021/22 1.04 per place 29 first choices 28 places 2022/23 1.33 per place 36 first choices 27 places 2023/24 1.7 per place 46 first choices 27 places 2024/25 1.21 per place 35 first choices 29 places 2025/26 1.07 per place 31 first choices 29 places 2026/27 1.39 per place 39 first choices 28 places
First preferences per place at Holy Trinity School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 39 first preferences for 28 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Holy Trinity 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 25 37 23 1.48
2016/17 23 32 23 1.39
2017/18 25 31 25 1.24
2018/19 25 28 23 1.12
2019/20 26 34 24 1.31
2020/21 23 20 19 0.87
2021/22 28 29 25 1.04
2022/23 27 36 24 1.33
2023/24 27 46 25 1.7
2024/25 29 35 25 1.21
2025/26 29 31 23 1.07
2026/27 28 39 24 1.39

Places offered

28

in 2026/27

Named first choice

39

95 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

61.5%

24 of 39

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 28 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

706

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

708

100.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

2

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

100

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 Holy Trinity 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 Holy Trinity 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, 2014/15 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Holy Trinity School 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 2014/15 688 places 439 on roll 2015/16 688 places 505 on roll 2016/17 688 places 550 on roll 2017/18 688 places 608 on roll 2018/19 785 places 650 on roll 2020/21 785 places 718 on roll 2021/22 785 places 729 on roll 2022/23 785 places 737 on roll 2023/24 806 places 741 on roll 2024/25 806 places 735 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. Holy Trinity School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Holy Trinity School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
4 September 2018 Arrangements did not comply ADA3465

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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Worcestershire

Postcode DY10 2BY. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 141105).

Other contested secondary schools in Worcestershire

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.