The timetable, and what the preferences actually do
Applications for a secondary place in England close on 31 October of the year before entry, and offers are issued on 1 March, or the next working day where that falls on a weekend or a bank holiday. The common application form must allow at least three preferences ranked in order; many authorities allow more, and six is the London norm.
Two things about those preferences are widely misunderstood, and both matter.
- A school is not told, and may not consider, where it was ranked. The Admissions Code prohibits giving priority on the basis of the order in which a parent listed their preferences. Putting a school first does not help an application to it.
- Naming only one school does not strengthen the case for it. It simply forfeits the other chances. A parent who lists one school and is refused has no other offer to fall back on, and the authority will allocate whatever place remains.
Wales operates the same two dates, and from the 2027/28 intake does so under a statutory co-ordinated scheme for the first time. Scotland works differently: there is no offer day, the catchment school is allocated and a request for another is a placing request, due by 15 March with a reply by 30 April. Northern Ireland runs its own timetable entirely, notifying parents on a set Saturday in May.
How places are decided when there are more applicants than places
Oversubscription criteria do the work, and they must be published. Looked-after and previously looked-after children take the highest priority — that is a requirement, not a local choice. Beyond that, criteria commonly turn on siblings, distance, catchment and, in faith schools, religious grounds.
Several things are prohibited outright. Arrangements may not introduce new selection by ability; may not give priority by the order of a parent's preferences; may not take account of reports from a previous school about behaviour or achievement; and may not name fee-charging independent schools as feeder schools.
A catchment area is a priority, not a boundary. It must be reasonable and clearly defined, and it does not prevent a parent living outside it from expressing a preference — nor does living inside it guarantee a place.
Appealing, and what the odds actually are
Every refusal carries a right of appeal to an independent panel. The practical shape of it: at least twenty school days to lodge a written appeal, at least ten school days' notice of the hearing, and in the normal admissions round the appeal must be heard within forty school days of the deadline for lodging. The panel is a chair plus at least two others, including at least one lay member and at least one person with education experience. Its members must be independent and remain so. A decision to admit is binding on the school.
The outcomes are published annually and are rarely quoted. For entry in September 2025, across England: 34,800 secondary appeals were lodged, 27,100 were heard, and 5,300 succeeded — a success rate of 19.5 per cent of appeals heard. At primary the equivalent figures were 12,300 lodged, 7,600 heard and 1,100 successful, a rate of 15.0 per cent. Both phases recorded their lowest hearing rate and lowest success rate since 2016.
Two cautions about that figure. It is calculated on appeals heard, not appeals lodged, and a substantial number are withdrawn before a hearing — often because a place comes up from the waiting list. Measured against everything lodged the rate would be materially lower. And the gap between lodged and heard is not published as a count, so it cannot be attributed precisely.
The test the panel applies has two stages. First it checks that the arrangements were lawful and were applied correctly and impartially, and asks whether admitting another child would prejudice efficient education or the efficient use of resources. The school must demonstrate prejudice beyond the mere fact that its admission number has been reached. If the matter is not resolved at that stage, the panel moves to the second, where it weighs the school's case against the appellant's — and this is the stage at which a parent's reasons for wanting the school are actually considered.
That second stage is why secondary appellants fare better than they might expect. Appeals for reception, Year 1 and Year 2 refused on the statutory thirty-pupil infant class limit are decided on a much narrower test with no balancing stage at all: the panel may uphold only where admission would not breach the limit, or the arrangements were misapplied and the child would otherwise have had a place, or the refusal was perverse in the light of the arrangements. Those appeals succeed at 8.1 per cent, against 26.4 per cent for older primary year groups. The dividing line is not primary against secondary, though — it is whether the refusal was made on the limit ground. An infant-phase refusal for any other reason gets the ordinary test.
The waiting list, and the one thing that moves it
A waiting list must be maintained until at least 31 December of the school year of admission. That is a floor rather than a closing date, and many admission authorities keep lists longer. The duty falls on the admission authority, which for most secondary schools means the academy trust or governing body rather than the local authority.
The ordering is the part that surprises people. Every list must be re-ranked against the published oversubscription criteria each time a child is added, and priority based on the date an application was received, or on when a name went onto the list, is expressly forbidden. Being on the list longest confers nothing. Where arrangements use random allocation, a fresh allocation must be run each time a place is offered, so an unlucky draw is not permanent either.
What does change a position:
- A change in the facts the criteria turn on — most obviously moving house, where distance or catchment is a criterion, or a sibling securing a place where siblings are prioritised. The rank is recalculated, so changing the underlying facts changes the outcome.
- Other children leaving the list, which moves positions without anyone doing anything.
- Being on it at all. The Code does not say whether a child is added automatically or must be asked for, and arrangements vary, so it is worth confirming locally rather than assuming.
One thing takes precedence over the whole list: looked-after and previously looked-after children placed through a fair access protocol.
Applying outside the normal round
An application made on or after the first day of the admission year is an in-year application, and a parent may apply to any school at any time. By 31 August each year a local authority must publish how in-year applications are handled from 1 September, naming the schools it co-ordinates and giving contact details for those that handle their own; schools running their own process must publish it by the same date.
The timescales are shorter than in the normal round:
- The outcome must be given in writing within fifteen school days, with the Code saying authorities should aim for ten.
- Figures on place availability must be supplied on request within two school days.
- An in-year appeal must be heard within thirty school days of being lodged, not forty.
A refusal must state the reason, the right of appeal, the deadline and contact details, and the admission authority cannot restrict the grounds on which a parent appeals. One practice is specifically prohibited and is worth knowing about in advance: a parent must not be told that they can only go on a waiting list rather than make a formal application. A formal application produces a refusal, and a refusal produces appeal rights.
When every school within reach is full
Beyond applying and appealing to each school in turn, two further mechanisms exist and neither is well known.
The first is the fair access protocol. Every local authority must have one, agreed with its schools, and once more than half agree it every admission authority in the area must take part — academies included. It covers a defined list of around a dozen groups of vulnerable children, among them those on a child protection or child in need plan, children in refuges, children leaving alternative provision or permanently excluded, young carers, homeless children, children in formal kinship care, and children who have been out of education for four weeks or more with no place within reasonable distance. Four features set it apart from an ordinary offer: a school must admit through it even when full; there is no duty to meet parental preference; the local authority decides eligibility and a parent cannot refer themselves, so the practical route is to apply, be refused, and ask the refusing school to consider eligibility; and a place must be allocated within twenty school days of the decision. Critically, accepting a protocol place does not forfeit the appeal — the right to appeal the original refusal survives, and a successful appeal can require admission even though a place has been offered elsewhere.
The second is the power to direct. A local authority may direct a maintained school for which it is not the admission authority to admit a child who has been refused a place or permanently excluded, where the school is a reasonable distance away and provides suitable education. The school may refer the matter to the Schools Adjudicator within fifteen days, and the adjudicator's determination settles it.
There is a gap in that power, and it is the single most consequential structural fact about admissions in England. A local authority cannot direct an academy. It may ask, and if the academy refuses, the authority can ask the Secretary of State to intervene under the funding agreement. The scale of the asymmetry shows in the adjudicator's own casework for 2024: five referrals concerning directions to maintained schools, against sixty-four cases in which the Secretary of State sought advice about an academy. Legislation passed in April 2026 would extend the direction power to academies and add new triggers, but as of the statute's last published revision in August 2026 those provisions had not been brought into force, and no commencement order covering them had appeared.
Challenging the rules, and complaining about the process
Three different routes exist and they do different things. Choosing the wrong one wastes the time limit on the right one.
- To challenge a school's admission arrangements — the rules rather than a decision about one child — anyone may object to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, parents included, with no need to have applied to the school. The deadline is 15 May in the determination year and it is hard. A determination is binding and enforceable, and must be implemented within two months or by the following 28 February, whichever comes sooner. The adjudicator's own figures for 2024 are striking: of 160 cases finalised, 45 were fully upheld and 78 partly upheld, so roughly three in four succeeded at least in part. But it does not decide individual cases. A successful objection changes the rules for future years; it does not produce a place in the round already under way.
- Where the process itself was mishandled at a maintained school, the route is the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman — within twelve months, normally only after appealing, though waiting list complaints and nursery refusals may go straight there. It investigates maladministration, is expressly not a further stage of appeal, and cannot overturn a panel's decision. Its usual remedy is a fresh appeal before a different panel and clerk; it recommends that a place be offered only in exceptional cases, and its findings are recommendations rather than orders.
- Where the process was mishandled at an academy or free school, the route is the Department for Education instead, which considers maladministration only and will not look at the panel's decision or the weight it gave to evidence. The time limit is six months — half the Ombudsman's. A parent who relies on the twelve-month figure after an academy appeal will be out of time. The agency that used to handle this closed on 31 March 2025, so any account directing complaints there is out of date.
One warning about signposting. The general government pages on complaining about a school do not cover admissions or admission appeals at all, and the generic route they describe ends nowhere useful for this subject.
What is expected to change
A schools white paper published in February 2026 committed the government to consulting on changes to the Admissions Code, with stated intentions covering more information for parents about in-year decisions, improvements to how local authorities run fair access protocols, tighter rules on banding, and encouragement of more inclusive arrangements. The timing given was only “later in the year”, and as of early November 2026 no consultation had opened and no revised Code had been published. The 2021 Code remains the operative one. For scale, the 2021 Code took about fourteen months from the opening of its consultation to coming into force.
Every date in this account — 31 October, 1 March, 15 May, 31 August, 31 December, and the various school-day limits — comes from that Code rather than from statute, so all of them are capable of changing with it.
For what the move itself involves, see moving from primary to secondary school; for reception rather than secondary, starting school; and for reading the performance data on a school under consideration, school results.