Occasional posts about what the admissions data actually shows. Every figure is computed from official sources over the whole of England, and we publish the sample coverage alongside it — if a dataset is too patchy to support a national claim, we say so instead of making one.
One English council heard 2,424 admission appeals over ten years and granted 93. Another granted six in every ten. Across 144 councils the success rate for secondary appeals in 2025 ran from 0% to 95%, and the pattern holds year after year.
A child in London has a 71.4% chance of a first-choice secondary place. In the South West it is 90.7%. That 19-point gap between regions is more than six times the largest change any region has seen in thirteen years — and it has not narrowed.
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