How we source and calculate the figures

Every number on this site comes from an official Department for Education statistical release. Nothing is modelled, estimated or inferred. Where a figure would be unreliable, we leave it out rather than print it with a caveat.

Where the data comes from

Appeal figures: Admission appeals in England, reporting year 2026. Local authorities return figures for community and voluntary controlled schools; academies, foundation and voluntary aided schools return directly. Published at council, regional and national level only.
Applications and offers: Primary and secondary school applications and offers, 2026/27. This one is published school by school, which is what makes the individual school pages possible.
School capacity: School capacity, school-level file. Each school's own reported places and pupils on roll, surveyed on 1 May. It is a whole-school figure across Years 7 to 11, not the year group being appealed, and it runs a year behind the application figures — the school pages say so wherever it appears.
Adjudicator determinations: Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations. Compiled by us from every determination the adjudicator has published on GOV.UK — there is no data file, so the decision, outcome, school type and council are read from each one. This is the only source here that is published school by school, and the only one about the rules a school admits by rather than about appeals. A determination is attached to a school only where the name matches exactly within the same council and is unique there; anything ambiguous is left unattached rather than guessed at.
Pupil projections: National pupil projections, 2026 model, published July 2026. The only modelled figures on this site, and the only ones that are not a count of something that has already happened — so they are kept to one page, labelled as projections wherever they appear, and never mixed into an appeal figure. Published for England as a whole with no local authority or regional breakdown, which is why no council page carries one.
School details: Get Information About Schools (GIAS) — names, phases, types and postcodes, matched to the statistical releases on each school's unique reference number.

Every statistical release used here is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

How the rates are worked out

Success rates are pooled over three years (2024–2026). A single year in a smaller council can swing wildly on a handful of cases; three years is steadier without being so long that it describes a system that has since changed.
No rate is shown below 10 appeals heard. Two upheld out of six is not a 33% success rate in any useful sense. Those cells read "too few to publish" instead.
Every rate is printed with its denominator. You should always be able to see the counts a percentage came from, on the same page and usually in the same sentence.
Demand ratios need at least 20 first choices. A school with three places and four applicants is not meaningfully "oversubscribed by a third".
Infant class size appeals are counted inside primary, not alongside it. They are a subset, so primary and secondary sum to the total and infant class size never gets added in twice.

What we deliberately do not publish

There is no such thing as a school's appeal odds

The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes from individual schools but only releases them added together at council level. No school-level appeal success rate exists, anywhere, for any school in England. Any site quoting you one has invented it.

The school pages carry two different things and keep them apart on purpose. Demand — places, first choices, offers — is that school's own data. Appeal outcomes are the council's, covering every state-funded school in the area, and are labelled as such wherever they appear.

A heavily oversubscribed school refuses more families, so more of them appeal. That is not the same as their appeals doing better, and we do not imply it is.

We also do not publish predictions. A council's past success rate is a description of what happened to other families, not a forecast about yours.

Coverage and updates

The site covers 151 councils and 1,835 secondary schools. Primary schools appear in the contested-schools tables on each council page rather than having pages of their own, because most primary refusals at the Reception intake are infant class size cases — a much narrower appeal with a far lower success rate.

Appeal figures are published annually in August and cover the previous admissions round. Applications and offers are published in the autumn. This site is rebuilt when each lands.

What this service is

We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice. Admission appeals are not a reserved legal activity under the Legal Services Act 2007; we prepare documents and explain the process.

Most appeals do not succeed — nationally, about one in five is upheld. We would rather tell you your case is weak than take money for a document that was never going to work.