Update regarding offer of Year 7 places for September 2017
You have submitted an online application for your child’s secondary school place. As you will be aware, secondary school places will be offered on Wednesday 1 March 2017. This update is to provide you with some useful information about the process and point you to additional support that will be available online.
As you applied online, you will be sent an email informing youwhich secondary school has been offered to your child. You will receive this email anytime up to 3.30pm on Wednesday 1 March. You will also receive this offer by letter on Thursday 2 March.
Please do not contact Birmingham City Council before you receive the formal notification of your child’s school place. The School Admissions team will be unable to inform you what secondary school place has been offered to your child by phone or other forms of contact until Thursday 2 March. You must be in receipt of your formal notification letter or email before contacting the Council.
If you are unhappy with the secondary school place offered to your child, more information and guidance on the next steps is available at
If your child has not been offered a place at any of the schools you applied for, this will be because the school(s) received more applications than there were places available and other children met the admission criteria better than your child.
If you don’t receive an offer of a place at your higher preference schools your child’s name will automatically be placed on the waiting lists for those schools. Please note that waiting lists have to be compiled in the same order as the oversubscription criteria, eg siblings first, etc. Late applicants are also added according to this order, so your child’s name can go down as well as up, and having a place on the waiting list is no guarantee that a place will become available.
Because of the movement in the first few weeks after 1 March, we do not disclose waiting list order. We will contact you if a place becomes available for your child.
After 21 March 2017, you may contact the Children’s Advice Service on 0121 303 1888 who will let you know who holds the waiting list for the school you want (either School Admissions or the school).
If you are considering the possibility of appealing the decision, please consider the advice regarding appeals on the School Admissions website. For example, were you realistic with the preferences you submitted for your child, did you include the school you wish to appeal in your application and are there genuine reasons why your child should attend that school?
Should you wish appeal, the closing date for submitting a completed appeal form is 29 March 2017. You can access the appeal form online via
For children starting Year 7 in September 2016, the council received 1075 appeals. All appeals were considered by an independent appeals panel. Of the 1075 appeals submitted, 2.9% were successful.
Full details of the schools admissions process and school admissions criteria is contained in the Secondary Education Opportunities booklet 2017, available via