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Grammar school admissions

If you appeal, what actually happens

Every one of these numbers came from a Freedom of Information response, a request anyone can make to a school or council, for free. Schools rarely publish them. We think you should see them before you decide whether to appeal.

21%
Upheld overall

3,968 families were heard and 853 won a place. Appeals for selective schools are hard to win, because the panel usually has to accept the child did not meet the standard the test set.

What an appeal actually is

A legal right, heard by outsiders

If your child is refused a place, you can put your case to an independent appeal panel. The panel is not the school: it has no stake in the outcome, and it can order the school to admit your child.

Two arguments actually win

Either the test did not show what your child can really do (illness on the day, a bereavement, something the school knew nothing about), or the school misapplied its own rules. A panel is generally not persuaded that your child would simply enjoy the school more.

Free, and nothing to lose

The deadline is usually about three weeks after National Offer Day in March, with hearings before the end of the summer term. Appealing costs nothing and does not affect the place you have already been offered somewhere else.

School by school

Hardest first, counting only schools where at least 20 families have been heard. Each row adds up every year that school’s authority released, and those periods differ from school to school, so the totals are not all measured over the same span. The number of years is shown so you can see which.

Too few hearings to rank

These schools have released figures, but too few appeals have been heard to say anything reliable about the odds. A run of 20 hearings is roughly where a percentage starts to mean something.

Where an authority withheld a figure because it was smaller than five, that year is left out of both the count and the percentage rather than treated as zero. Some authorities label their figures by the year of the appeal rather than the year of entry, and where they did not say, we have not guessed.

Where these numbers came from

Freedom of Information responses published on whatdotheyknow.com, plus figures councils released directly. Each school page links to the specific reply behind its own figures. If a school is not listed here, it is because no authority has released its appeal figures, not because nobody appealed.

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