School admission appeal statistics for England

Success rate by phase

A secondary appeal and an infant class size appeal are not the same exercise. Infant classes are capped at 30 by statute, so a panel may only uphold an appeal where the arrangements were unlawful, applied wrongly, or the decision was one no reasonable authority would have reached.

Infant class size appeals are a subset of the primary figures, not an additional category.

Why infant class size appeals succeed so much less often →

Appeals in England, 2016–2026

The second line is the secondary-only rate, which runs consistently above the all-phase figure because primary appeals — and infant class size appeals in particular — pull the average down.

The postcode lottery

The gap between councils is the most striking thing in the dataset. Over 2024–2026 the highest council rate was roughly 32.2 times the lowest, and both figures rest on hundreds of heard appeals — this is not small-sample noise.

Only councils with at least 10 appeals heard are ranked.

By region

Where the appeals are

Appeals are heavily concentrated. The 20 busiest councils account for about 40% of all appeals heard in England, which is why a national average is a poor guide to what happens where you live.

Figures for every council →

What does not vary by council is the test itself — what actually counts as grounds for appeal.

Where places are hardest to get

Appeal outcomes are only published by council, but applications and offers are published school by school. That is the closest thing there is to a map of where refusals happen — and refusals are what produce appeals.

In 2026/27, 38% of England's secondary schools received more first choices than they had places (1,220 of 3,212), against 22% of primary schools (3,448 of 15,666). A secondary place is about 1.7 times as likely to be contested as a primary one, which is the same reason secondary appeals outnumber primary appeals by three to one.

That is the strict count. A further 212 secondary schools had places on paper and still refused families who named them first — the pattern where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice, common at selective, faith and single-sex schools. Counting those too, 44.6% of secondary schools turned first-choice families away.

Department for Education, Primary and secondary school applications and offers, school-level file, 2026/27.

When the rules themselves are wrong

Appeals are about how the rules were applied to one child. Separately, anyone can object that a school's admission rules break the Code, and the Schools Adjudicator publishes a determination naming the school. Since 2011 it has decided 1,251 of them and found the arrangements did not comply in 68.3%.

That is the share of objections, not of schools — objections come from people who already believe something is wrong, and most schools never appear at all. It is also not an appeal figure: a finding against a school's rules says nothing about how its appeals go.

How often admission rules are found not to comply →

How many children there are to compete

Everything above counts appeals that have already happened. The other half of the picture is demographic: the cohort going through secondary admissions peaked in 2024 and is projected to be 13.4% smaller by 2031. Fewer children means fewer refusals in aggregate — though it changes nothing about how a panel decides the appeal in front of it, and the oversubscribed schools stay oversubscribed.

Pupil projections to 2031 →

Projections are published for England as a whole. There is no local authority breakdown, so they appear here and not on council pages.