How local authorities should collect and submit admission appeals data from all community and voluntary-controlled schools in their area.

The school admission appeals data collection (also known as APAD) is a statutory data collection that local authorities submit to us every January. You must complete statutory collections by law unless there’s a good reason not to.

Important dates

Deadlines for the 2021 collection:

  • admission appeals deadline: Tuesday 1 September 2020
  • collection opens: Monday 11 January 2021
  • deadline for submitting data: Friday 22 January 2021

What data to collect and submit

The collection gathers information about appeals that parents have asked for (lodged) before 1 September because their child was not admitted to their preferred school.

It only covers community and voluntary-controlled primary and secondary schools (including middle-deemed schools). For each phase, you must report:

  • the total number of lodged appeals
  • the total number of heard appeals
  • appeal outcomes

Note that if a community and voluntary-controlled school is in the process of converting to an academy, you should only include them if they are still under local authority control on spring school census day (Thursday 21 January 2021).

Submit your data

You should submit your data using COLLECT, our centralised data collection and management system.

Note that we’ll only be able to change the status of your data submission to ‘authorised’, once you’ve cleared all errors in the data in COLLECT.

Data collection documents

Our guidance will help you complete the collection:

Do you need help?

Submitting data

Please use the service request form if you have any questions about your data. Ensure you have:

  • checked the data collection enquiry button
  • selected ‘appeal against admissions’ in the drop-down menu

Accessing COLLECT

Reset your secure access login details using the forgotten password or username form.

Please contact your school or local authority approver if:

  • you want to request a secure access username or password so you can access COLLECT
  • ‘school admission appeals data collection’ isn’t on the list of collections you can see in COLLECT

If you don’t know who your approver is, please use the secure access service request form. Select ‘I do not know who the approver is for my organisation’.

Feedback

Please use the feedback form if you have any comments about our data collection service, including COLLECT and the helpdesk service.

Published 1 December 2016
Last updated 28 September 2020 + show all updates

  1. Added link to ‘School admission appeals data collection 2021: guide’.

  2. Added data collection dates for 2021.

  3. Updated important dates for 2020 and collection guide.

  4. Updated page for 2019 collection and added updated guide to linked page.

  5. Updated information under ‘Important dates’ and ‘What data to collect and submit’ sections of the page. Added a link to the 2018 collection guide under ‘Collection documents’.

  6. First published.

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