How to appeal a refused school place

Being refused a place is not the end of the process. Every parent refused a place at a state-funded school in England has a legal right to appeal to an independent panel, and the panel’s decision is binding: if it finds for you, the school must admit your child, even where that takes it above its published admission number.

Appeals are not a formality and they are not hopeless either. Around a quarter of secondary appeals and a fifth of primary ones succeed. What follows is how the process actually works, and where parents most often put their effort in the wrong place.

Accept the place you were offered first

This feels like giving up and it is not. Accepting the school you were allocated does not weaken your appeal, does not remove you from a waiting list, and does not count against you at the hearing. It only means your child has somewhere to go in September if the appeal fails. Refusing the offered place, by contrast, can leave you with nothing.

Join the waiting list for the school you want at the same time. A surprising number of places come free over the summer as families move or accept elsewhere, and a waiting list place costs nothing to hold while the appeal runs.

The deadlines

These come from the School Admission Appeals Code, and admission authorities must follow them:

• You must be given at least 20 school days from the date you were told your application was unsuccessful to lodge your appeal. School days, not calendar days, so half terms extend it.
• You must be given at least 10 school days’ notice of the hearing.
• For the main admissions round, the appeal must be heard within 40 school days of the deadline for lodging appeals. In practice that means hearings in May, June or July for a September start.
• You should have the decision in writing, usually within five school days of the hearing, though authorities hearing many appeals for one school may take longer.

Your refusal letter must tell you how to appeal and by when. Late appeals are usually still heard, but they may be heard after the others, which can mean after term has started.

The two-stage test

Most appeals are decided in two stages, and understanding the split is the single most useful thing you can do before writing your case.

Stage one asks whether the school is genuinely full. The panel considers whether the admission arrangements were properly applied to your child, and whether admitting another pupil would actually cause problems for the school. This is where a mistake in the process gets caught: a sibling link that was missed, a distance measured from the wrong address, an oversubscription criterion applied in the wrong order. If the panel finds an error, or finds the school is not in fact harmed by taking another child, you can win at this stage without needing to say anything about your family at all.

Stage two weighs your case against the school’s. Only if the panel accepts the school would be harmed does it move on to balancing that harm against your reasons for wanting the place. This is where personal circumstances count: medical needs, a sibling already at the school, particular provision your child needs that the allocated school does not offer.

What actually persuades a panel

Specific, evidenced, and about this school rather than about schools in general.

• Errors in how your application was handled. Ask the admission authority for the distance of the last child admitted and the distance recorded for yours. If they differ from what you expect, you may have a stage one case.
• Something this school offers that the allocated one does not, which your child specifically needs. A named provision, a subject, a unit. Not that it is a better school.
• Medical or social need, with evidence. A letter from a GP, consultant or social worker carries far more weight than a parent’s description of the same thing.
• Practical difficulty that is genuinely severe, not merely inconvenient. Two children at schools an hour apart in opposite directions is a real problem. A longer journey is not.

What rarely helps: league table positions, Ofsted grades, the school’s reputation, or that friends got in. Panels hear these constantly and they say nothing about your child.

Infant class size appeals are different

This is the part that catches families out, and it is worth checking before you spend a weekend writing a statement.

The law limits infant classes — Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 — to 30 pupils per teacher. Where admitting your child would breach that limit, the school would have to take what the regulations call qualifying measures: employ another teacher, or reorganise into another class. In that situation the panel’s powers are severely restricted. It can only allow the appeal if:

• the admission arrangements were not properly applied to your child;
• the arrangements themselves did not comply with admissions law; or
• the decision to refuse was one no reasonable authority could have made.

That last test is a high bar, and it is deliberately high. In an infant class size case the panel cannot weigh your personal circumstances at all. Childcare, siblings at different schools, work patterns, medical grounds: the panel must set them aside, however sympathetic. Parents often find this out at the hearing, having built their whole case on exactly those points.

So establish early which kind of appeal you have. Look at how the school organises its infant classes: a school admitting 45 a year but teaching Years 1 and 2 as three mixed classes of 30 will hit the limit later even if Reception looks under it. If it is an infant class size case, put your effort entirely into whether the arrangements were applied correctly — that is the only door open.

The panel

At least three people, independent of both the school and the local authority, including at least one lay member with no personal experience of school management. They follow the statutory appeals code. Academies and free schools are bound by the same rules through their funding agreements, so the process is the same wherever you are appealing.

Hearings may be in person, by video, or a mix. You can bring someone with you. You do not need a solicitor, and panels are used to hearing from parents directly.

If the appeal fails

The panel’s decision is final in the sense that there is no second appeal on the same grounds. You can complain to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman if you believe the process was handled improperly — the Ombudsman looks at how the decision was reached, not whether it was right. For academies, complaints go to the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

Stay on the waiting list. It is the most common route to a place after a failed appeal, and it costs nothing. You can also appeal again in a later year, or for a different year group, since each admission round is a fresh decision.

This is a general guide to how appeals work, not advice about your case. Your local authority publishes its own timetable and forms, and anything specific to your child should go to them or to the school. Admissions deadlines sets out the dates for the main rounds.