Results day, waiting lists and appeals: what happens next

An 11+ result is not an offer. A refusal on National Offer Day is not the end of the process. Three mechanisms sit between the autumn letter and the first day of Year 7. The waiting list re-ranks itself every time somebody joins it. The review, in areas that run one. The appeal, heard by a panel that does not work for the school. They run on different dates and carry very different odds, and families routinely spend their energy on the wrong one.

What follows is how each of them works, drawn from the two statutory codes and the outcome figures schools have released about themselves. It is not advice on what to put in an appeal, and nothing here predicts what a panel will do with your case.

What are the dates, and which one do families miss?

Results come early on purpose. The School Admissions Code tells admission authorities to take all reasonable steps to inform parents of the outcome of selection tests before the closing date for secondary applications on 31 October, so the result is in your hands while you can still change which schools you name. The same sentence warns that reaching the standard “does not equate to a guarantee of a selective place”, which is the most useful line in the document.

That gap between a score and a place is where the autumn’s misery lives. If the number in the letter is still opaque, what a standardised age score is measuring and how a qualifying score is set and why it moves cover it properly. The rest of the calendar is statutory and the same everywhere in England.

When	What happens	Set by
Before 31 October	Selection test results reach parents	Admissions Code 1.32(c)
31 October	Deadline for the council application naming your schools	Admissions Code, footnote 8
By 28 February	Each admission authority publishes its appeals timetable	Appeals Code 2.2
1 March	National Offer Day for secondary places	Admissions Code, paragraph 15(e)
At least 20 school days after the refusal	Deadline for lodging a written appeal	Appeals Code 2.1(a)
At least 10 school days before the hearing	You are notified of the date and arrangements	Appeals Code 2.1(b) and 2.7
Within 40 school days of the lodging deadline	Appeals in the normal admissions round are heard	Appeals Code 2.3(a)
Within five school days of the hearing	The decision letter is sent, wherever possible	Appeals Code 2.1(d) and 2.27

The date families miss is the one in February. The appeals timetable has to be published before any refusal letter exists, so the deadline for lodging is knowable well in advance, and parents who wait for the letter before finding out how the process works lose part of their allotted weeks to reading.

How does the waiting list actually work?

This is the part almost everyone gets wrong. A waiting list for a school place is not first come, first served. The School Admissions Code requires a clear, fair and objective list, and says that each added child will require the list to be ranked again in line with the published oversubscription criteria, and that priority must not be given on the basis of the date an application was received or a name was added.

So a family who joins in June can be placed above one who joined in March: the ranking is done afresh against the criteria, not the calendar. Your position can fall as well as rise, and a number you watched creep upwards all summer was never a promise.

The list must be kept until at least 31 December of each school year of admission, which is the statutory floor rather than the practice: many authorities run theirs longer. Joining is not automatic either. The GOV.UK instruction is to contact the school or your council to have a name added, and a family who assumes a refusal puts them on the list can wait a term for a call that was never coming.

At a selective school there is a second layer, because a child normally has to have reached the academic standard before the criteria apply at all. Reaching it puts your child into the queue, not into a place. What those published criteria actually weigh once you are in it, distance from the school included, is set out in how catchment and distance actually work.

What is an appeal panel actually deciding?

An appeal is heard by an independent panel, not by the school, and its decision has force: under the School Standards and Framework Act, a panel’s decision that a child shall be admitted is binding on the admission authority concerned. The panel either upholds or dismisses, and it cannot uphold subject to conditions.

For everything except infant class size cases the Appeals Code sets out a two-stage process, and knowing which stage you are in explains most of the hearing . At the first stage the panel asks whether the admission arrangements complied with the law and were correctly and impartially applied, and whether admitting more children would prejudice the efficient provision of education or the efficient use of resources. If the arrangements were wrong and your child would otherwise have had a place, the appeal is upheld there. Otherwise it goes to the second stage, where that prejudice is balanced against your reasons for wanting the place.

Selective schools have their own paragraph, and it decides most 11+ appeals. Where a panel is asked to find that a child did not perform at their best on the day, the Code allows it to uphold the appeal only if satisfied there is evidence the child is of the required academic standard and, where relevant, that the case outweighs the prejudice . Panels are told not to devise their own methods of assessing suitability. That is the process; what you say inside it belongs to your case, not to a template, and any site that offers you one is guessing at a case it has never seen.

What are the odds of winning an appeal?

Across the schools whose authorities have released their figures, we hold 3,968 hearings and 853 places won, about a fifth, pooled across 44 schools. A fifth is a useful number to know and a poor one to plan with, because the schools inside it are nothing like each other.

School	Entry years released	Heard	Upheld
The Harvey Grammar School	2022 and 2023	79	63
Oakwood Park Grammar School	2022 and 2023	128	91
St Bernard’s Catholic Grammar School	2019 to 2025	525	127
Langley Grammar School (appeals lodged; the school did not release a separate heard count)	2020 to 2025	434	8
Wilmington Grammar School for Girls	2021 to 2025	271	3
Dartford Grammar School for Girls	2019 only	96	0

Read the two ends of that table together. At The Harvey Grammar School in Kent most families who were heard were admitted, on a request made by a member of the public and answered by the school’s own business manager . At Langley Grammar School in Berkshire, six entry years of appeals lodged (the school released lodged rather than heard counts, so some of those will have been withdrawn before a hearing) produced a handful of places, and at Dartford Grammar School for Girls the single year released produced none.

None of that predicts anything about your child. It is the base rate at those schools in those years, a more modest thing, and still better information than a parent usually gets in March.

Why is the spread so wide?

A high rate is not generosity and a low one is not severity. What moves these numbers most is whether the school was full.

A school that filled every place and holds a long ranked list behind it can demonstrate prejudice easily, so most of its appeals reach the second stage. A school with room in the year group has a much harder case at the first stage, and its rate rises accordingly. Several Kent schools with strong reputations sit high in the upheld column for that reason: the figure is telling you about roll and capacity in one year, not about how sympathetic the panel was.

A school with two years released and a school with seven are not comparable either, so every row in the full record of appeal figures, school by school carries the number of years it pools.

Why are some schools’ odds not given as a percentage?

A rate needs a denominator worth dividing. Ilford County High School for Boys released one entry year in which eight families were heard and one was admitted. The arithmetic is easy and the result is meaningless: one hearing either way moves it further than the gap between most of the schools above. Where fewer than ten families have been heard, we publish the counts and withhold the rate.

A suppressed figure is not a zero. Buckinghamshire releases upheld counts below five as a redaction rather than a number, so at John Hampden Grammar School we hold 66 hearings across three appeal years with every upheld count withheld. Reading those as none upheld would invent a fact the authority never stated, so that school carries counts and no rate at all.

And absence is not evidence. A school missing from the record is one whose authority has not released figures, not one where nobody appealed. The schools that publish are not a random sample of the schools that exist.

Is a review the same as an appeal?

Several selective areas run a review, variously called a local review, a head teacher assessment or a selection review. The Appeals Code describes it as a process for deciding whether a child who did not reach the standard on the test should be treated as being of grammar school standard, completed before places are allocated, and it is explicit that a review does not replace a parent’s right of appeal .

A review runs in the autumn, on the area’s own timetable, and is usually started by the primary school rather than by you. An appeal runs in the spring, after a refusal, and is started by you. Missing the review window does not close the appeal route, and winning at review is not an offer: it puts a child back into the same ranked pool as everyone who reached the standard first time.

Kent is the area families ask about most, and its sequence through to the head teacher assessment is set out in the Kent Test, from registration to results. Clearing a total is not the same as being assessed as of grammar ability there, as the children who cleared the headline total and were still not assessed as grammar shows.

What should you do next for your child?

Four things, in the order they will matter to you.

Read the refusal letter for its dates before you read it for anything else. It has to carry the reason, the right of appeal, the deadline and the contact details, and the deadline is the only part that expires.

Treat the waiting list as a live process rather than a queue you have joined. Confirm in writing that your child is on it, ask the admission authority which criterion they are currently ranked under, and expect the position to move both ways. That second answer tells you far more than a position number does.

Look up your own school’s figures rather than a national average, because almost no individual school sits near the pooled rate.

Keep two questions apart: whether to appeal, and whether your child is ready for that school if the appeal succeeds. They feel like one question in March. If you are reading this before the test rather than after it, when to start preparing is the more useful page.

Common questions

Can my child’s 11+ result be wrong?

A clerical query is a different thing from an appeal. Ask the school or council that sent the letter what its own checking process is and by when a query has to be raised. If the place is then refused, the right of appeal to an independent panel exists whatever the answer.

How likely is an appeal for a grammar school place to succeed?

It depends enormously on the school, and nobody can tell you your own odds. Across every school whose figures we hold, about a fifth of hearings ended in a place, and schools inside that set run from none upheld to most upheld.

Does time on the waiting list improve my child’s position?

No. The School Admissions Code requires the list to be ranked again against the published oversubscription criteria every time a child is added, and says priority must not be given on the basis of the date a name went on it .

What is a review, and is it the same as an appeal?

They are different processes at different points in the year. A review, where an area runs one, reconsiders whether a child should be treated as being of grammar school standard, and finishes before places are allocated. An appeal comes after a refusal and is heard by an independent panel.

When do I have to lodge an appeal by?

The admission authority sets the date and must publish its appeals timetable on its website by 28 February each year. The Appeals Code requires you to be allowed at least 20 school days from the refusal letter to prepare and lodge a written appeal .