How far Bolton schools admitted from

Every refusal carries a right of appeal to an independent panel. In Bolton, panels heard 290 appeals for secondary places in the 2025 round and allowed 63 of them, 21.7%, against 19.9% across England. These are the council's figures for all its schools together: appeals are not published school by school, so no one can tell you the rate for one named school, and this page will not pretend to.

An infant class appeal, for reception to year 2, can only be allowed on narrow legal grounds, which is why its share is a fraction of the others.

In Bolton, 5.2% of primary school sessions were missed in 2024/25, about the same as the 5.2% across England. That is days missed. The second figure is children: 13.4% of primary pupils here were persistently absent, meaning they missed a tenth or more of their sessions, about the same as England's 13.0%.

Persistently absent means missing a tenth or more of their sessions, for any reason, authorised or not. A council's rate is moved by things no school controls, term-time holidays and a bad winter among them, so read it as the weather around the schools rather than a mark against them. Higher or lower is said only where the two rates differ by at least 1 percentage point.

These are Bolton's figures for all its schools together. The Department for Education publishes absence by council, not school by school, so no one can give you the rate for one named school from this release. Source: DfE pupil absence in schools in England, explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk. Read on 1 October 2026.

For every oversubscribed school, Bolton publishes how far away the last child offered a place lived. A short distance means a school that fills up close to its gates; a long one means places went further afield. The address on the deadline is the one the council uses.

These are not catchment areas: most English schools have none. Each figure is the distance from the school to the home of the furthest child who was offered a place under the distance criterion in that round, as Bolton measures it, which is usually a straight line from a fixed point at the home to one at the school. Looked-after children, siblings and, at faith schools, faith criteria come before distance, so a school can fill before distance is reached at all. The figure moves every year with the number of applications. How the whole process works →