Your school appeal's odds depend more on your council than your case
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.
If your child misses out on every school you applied for, you can appeal. The guidance you will be given is national, the law is national, and the test an independent panel applies is national. The outcome is not.
Over the ten years to 2025, Newham heard 2,424 secondary admission appeals and upheld 93 of them — 3.8%. Sunderland heard 1,146 and upheld 709 — 61.9%. Same law, same grounds, comparable volumes of cases, and a 16-fold difference in whether a family gets the place.
It is not one unusual year
A single year's figures for one council can turn on a handful of cases, so every number here excludes councils that heard fewer than 30 appeals — and the pattern is there whichever year you look at. Across 10 years the median council upheld between 18.2% and 24.7% of the appeals it heard.
The gap has narrowed, and it is worth saying so: the distance between the tenth and ninetieth percentile council has fallen from 40.5 percentage points in 2016 to 29.3 in 2025, driven almost entirely by the most generous councils becoming less so rather than the strictest becoming more generous. A 29.3-point gap is still an enormous difference in whether a family gets a place, and on that trend it would take decades to disappear.
Primary is the same lottery, at a lower base rate
For reception places, 80 councils heard enough appeals to count. The median upheld 14.1%, against 18.9% at secondary — appealing a reception place is materially harder — and the range still runs from 0.0% to 52.2%.
The two phases do not even track each other inside the same council. Across the 80 councils with enough appeals in both, the median gap between a council's own primary and secondary rate is 6.8 percentage points. In Barnsley it is 23.0 (20.0% primary, 43.0% secondary). Whatever is driving this, it is not a single council-wide policy on how generous to be.
What this means if you are deciding whether to appeal
An appeal costs a family time, paperwork and several weeks of not knowing. The honest advice — "it depends on the strength of your case" — is incomplete. It also depends, and by a wide margin, on which panel hears it.
Two practical consequences. If you are in a council near the top of that chart, an appeal is a realistic route to a place and is probably worth the effort. If you are near the bottom, it is closer to a formality, and the effort may be better spent on waiting lists, which move on a different mechanism and are not decided by a panel at all. Either way, ask your council for its own published figures before you decide — every one of them has them.
None of this tells you whether your case is strong, and a council with a high rate is not obliged to be generous to you. But going in without knowing the base rate means judging your odds from the wrong information. For the school itself, you can check how oversubscribed it actually is on the map or by asking directly.
Method, and what it does not cover
Department for Education admission appeals statistics, every local authority in England, 2016 to 2025, 157 councils.
The rate is out of appeals heard, not appeals lodged. Appeals are withdrawn, or ruled ineligible, before ever reaching a panel; counting those would measure how parents behave rather than how panels decide. Councils hearing fewer than 30 appeals are excluded from every figure above — a council that hears eight and grants three is not a 38% council, and the extremes of a small-denominator list are noise dressed up as a finding. The ten-year comparison uses a higher floor again, 300 appeals, so the two councils named at the top are not there on a thin sample.
What the figures cannot tell you. They do not say why the rates differ. A council with more genuinely full schools has less room to admit an extra child, so a low rate may reflect tight capacity rather than a hard panel — infant classes are capped at 30 by law, which constrains reception appeals in particular. Panels are independent of the council that convenes them, so this is not a measure of council policy. And an upheld appeal is not always a place at the school first choice: it is a place at the school appealed for.
Scope. England only, state-funded schools, and local authority admissions. Academies and voluntary-aided schools that act as their own admission authority run their own panels; their outcomes are reported in these totals where the LA collects them, but the split is not published, so a council's figure blends both.
How this was calculated. Computed from the Department for Education's admission appeals statistics for every local authority in England, 2016 to 2025. Figures generated 18 August 2026. Primary source: DfE — Admission appeals in England. Every figure on this page, and the sample it rests on, is published as machine-readable data — so the numbers can be checked, reused or disagreed with rather than taken on trust.