School admission appeals data collection: how to submit data
How local authorities should collect and submit admission appeals data from all community and voluntary-controlled schools in their area.
Applies to England
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 2027 collection:
- include admission appeals that were logged by Tuesday 1 September 2026
- data collection opens on Monday 11 January 2027
- submit data by Friday 22 January 2027
What data to collect and submit
The data 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:
- total number of lodged appeals
- total number of heard appeals
- appeal outcomes
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. This is Thursday 21 January 2027.
How to submit your data
You’ll need to:
- register and sign in with DfE Sign-in
- use COLLECT to submit your data
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.
Contact your school or local authority approver if:
- you want to request a DfE Sign-in username or password so you can access COLLECT
- ‘APAD 2027’ is not on the list of collections you can see in COLLECT
Data collection guidance documents
Our guidance will help you complete the data collection:
Get help using DfE Sign-in
Use DfE Sign-in help if:
- you do not know who your approver is
- you’ve forgotten your password
Feedback
If you have any comments about our data collection service, use the feedback form.