Mercia School
URN 145897 · Secondary · Free schools · Sheffield
Carter Knowle Road, Sheffield, S7 2DY
How many families applied
Preferences expressed and offers made at Year 7, as published by the Department for Education. These describe demand. They do not indicate whether any particular child would be offered a place.
In the 2025 intake, 358 families named Mercia School as their first preference, and the school made 179 offers.
That is 2.00 first preferences per place offered, which places it above 98% of schools admitting at Year 7 in England that year.
position among schools in England admitting at Year 7, 2025 intake
More families are naming it first. Across the 5 most recent years held, first preferences per place averaged 1.5 in 2021–2022 and 1.91 in 2024–2025.
| Intake | 1st preferences | All preferences | Offers made | 1st prefs per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 358 | 941 | 179 | 2.00 |
| 2024 | 347 | 921 | 190 | 1.83 |
| 2023 | 287 | 799 | 180 | 1.59 |
| 2022 | 285 | 755 | 181 | 1.57 |
| 2021 | 246 | 664 | 172 | 1.43 |
| 2020 | 230 | 589 | 180 | 1.28 |
| 2019 | 162 | 469 | 119 | 1.36 |
“Offers made” counts the offers the school made. It is not the number of places the school had, so please do not read it as one.
Ofsted
Ofsted changed its inspection framework: the current one publishes several graded areas and no single overall grade, while the previous one published an overall effectiveness grade. Each inspection below states which framework produced it.
Ofsted graded inspection (previous framework), 8 February 2023
Overall effectiveness: Outstanding
Quality of education: Outstanding
Behaviour and attitudes: Outstanding
Personal development: Outstanding
Leadership and management: Outstanding
Early years: 9
Sixth form / post-16: 9
Ofsted's report for this school
Exam results
Published by the Department for Education for the whole year group. Figures for smaller cohorts are withheld by DfE to protect pupil privacy and appear here as a dash, not a zero.
| Year | Attainment 8 | Progress 8 | Grade 4+ English & maths | EBacc grade 4+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | 68.10 | - | 93.6% | 82.6% |
| 2023/24 | 69.40 | 2.09 likely between 1.83 and 2.35 |
95.8% | 91.5% |
| 2022/23 | 70.10 | 2.24 likely between 1.98 and 2.50 |
96.6% | 91.5% |
Progress 8 compares pupils here with pupils nationally who had similar results at the end of primary school; 0 is average. It is an estimate, and DfE publishes a range it is likely to fall within. Where that range spans zero, the school cannot be said to be above or below average.
Teachers staying and leaving
These come from the School Workforce Census, which follows each teacher into the next year. The numbers count full-time jobs, so a teacher who works half the week counts as half. They are not a count of people.
| Census year | Teachers (FTE) | Still there a year later | Moved to another state school | Left state schools | Left in total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | 72.0 | 61.4 | 6.6 | 4.0 | 14.7% |
| 2023/24 | 67.4 | 59.0 | 5.0 | 3.4 | 12.5% |
| 2022/23 | 57.0 | 51.0 | 2.0 | 4.0 | 10.5% |
| 2021/22 | 44.0 | 36.0 | 3.0 | 5.0 | 18.2% |
| 2020/21 | 31.6 | 29.6 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 6.3% |
| 2019/20 | 18.8 | 16.6 | 1.8 | 0.4 | 11.7% |
This is turnover among teachers. It says nothing about the headteacher or the senior leadership team: DfE publishes leadership retention separately and we do not hold it by school.
Catchment area
Sheffield publishes an admission zone for this school (Mercia School), in force from 2025.
Covers: 4,559 live postcodes across 95.179 km².
This zone overlaps others. An address here may also fall inside the catchment of Bradfield School, High Storrs School, King Ecgbert School, King Edward VII School, Meadowhead School Academy Trust, Newfield Secondary School, Sheffield Springs Academy, Silverdale School and Tapton School & Sixth Form. Being in this catchment does not mean being in only this one.
143 of the postcodes in this zone sit within 50 m of its edge. We place an address by its postcode centroid, not the address itself, so for those a specific house may fall the other side of the line.
How places were allocated
Sheffield publishes these figures on national offer day, the day families are told which school their child has been given. It is the only place that says how the school chose between the children who applied.
2026 intake
Places offered: 194
More children wanted a place than there were places: yes
The child who lived furthest away and still got in lived: 0.9 miles away (1455 m)
These distances are measured in a straight line across the map.
Children waiting for a place: 248
How the places were shared out
Schools that get more applications than they have places have to choose. Each school has a list of rules, and it works down the list until the places run out. Sheffield publishes how many children got in under each rule. These are Sheffield's own names for its own rules, so they do not mean the same thing at a school in another area.
2026 intake
| Rule | Children who got in this way |
|---|---|
| Catchment | 104 |
| Catchment, with a sibling attending the school | 81 |
| Pupils with an Education Health and Care Plan | 6 |
| Children looked after | 3 |
| All the children counted here | 194 |
A rule that let nobody in that year is not listed. Some children are given a place at a school they did not ask for, because they have to go somewhere, and no rule applies to them.
Where it is
The shaded shape is the area the council published for Mercia School. Living inside it is not the same as being offered a place. Councils use these areas in different ways. Some use them to help decide who gets a place when a school is full. Some use them to decide who gets free school transport. Many use them for both. Check with the council which it is here. The edge is drawn to about 20 metres, so do not use it to judge a single house.
The 6 nearest secondary schools we hold figures for, by straight-line distance from Mercia School.
- High Storrs School: 1.9 km (1.2 miles) west, Sheffield
- Silverdale School: 2.3 km (1.4 miles) west, Sheffield
- Newfield Secondary School: 2.3 km (1.5 miles) east, Sheffield
- Notre Dame High School: 2.7 km (1.7 miles) north-west, Sheffield
- King Edward VII School: 2.7 km (1.7 miles) north, Sheffield
- Tapton School & Sixth Form: 3.1 km (1.9 miles) north-west, Sheffield
Nearby and related
- Other schools near Mercia School
- All schools in Sheffield
- Schools in the S7 postcode district
- What data we hold
- This page as JSON: the same figures, for software that would rather not read a web page
Where these figures come from
- Department for Education: Get Information about Schools. School identity, type, phase and address
Retrieved 2 September 2026 - Ofsted: state-funded school inspections management information. Inspection outcomes, published monthly
Retrieved 4 September 2026 - Department for Education: school-level applications and offers. Preferences and offers, 2019 to 2025 intakes
Retrieved 4 September 2026 - Sheffield: offer-day statistics. Oversubscribed secondary schools, September 2026 entry, Sheffield City Council
Retrieved 5 September 2026 - Sheffield: admission rule breakdown. How places were shared out, 2026 to 2026 intakes
Retrieved 5 September 2026 - Department for Education: key stage 4 performance. Attainment 8, Progress 8 and EBacc, by school
Retrieved 4 September 2026 - Department for Education: school workforce in England. Teacher turnover, by school, from the School Workforce Census
Retrieved 4 September 2026 - Sheffield: school admission zones. arcgis fetch 2026-09-05
Retrieved 5 September 2026
This page was made on 9 September 2026. "Retrieved" means the day we downloaded the data. It is not the day the data was written, so the figures can be about an earlier year. How we compare schools.