School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bexley Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 165 families who named Bexley Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 208 and 334 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Bexley actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.

1.61

first choices for every place available

334 first preferences for 208 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bexley Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Bexley Grammar School, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Bexley as a whole and cover every state-funded school in the authority. Anyone quoting you odds for a named school is making them up.

Across Bexley, 12.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 55 of 449 appeals heard in 2024–2026. The England figure is 20.1%.

A panel is not deciding whether you want the school. It decides whether the admission arrangements were lawful and correctly applied, and then whether the harm to your child of not being admitted outweighs the harm to the school of going over its published number. Cases built on preference rather than on those two questions are the ones that fail.

See the full appeal figures for Bexley.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Bexley ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.

How contested this school has been

Bexley Grammar School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Bexley Grammar School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.42 per place 272 first choices 191 places 2016/17 1.66 per place 319 first choices 192 places 2017/18 1.63 per place 312 first choices 191 places 2018/19 1.39 per place 265 first choices 191 places 2019/20 1.38 per place 307 first choices 222 places 2020/21 1.57 per place 350 first choices 223 places 2021/22 3.74 per place 714 first choices 191 places 2022/23 1.91 per place 367 first choices 192 places 2023/24 1.76 per place 335 first choices 190 places 2024/25 1.61 per place 338 first choices 210 places 2025/26 1.69 per place 358 first choices 212 places 2026/27 1.61 per place 334 first choices 208 places
First preferences per place at Bexley Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 334 first preferences for 208 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bexley Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 191 272 179 1.42
2016/17 192 319 181 1.66
2017/18 191 312 176 1.63
2018/19 191 265 167 1.39
2019/20 222 307 200 1.38
2020/21 223 350 196 1.57
2021/22 191 714 164 3.74
2022/23 192 367 165 1.91
2023/24 190 335 167 1.76
2024/25 210 338 172 1.61
2025/26 212 358 171 1.69
2026/27 208 334 169 1.61

Places offered

208

in 2026/27

Named first choice

334

1,377 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

50.6%

169 of 334

Offers to families outside the council

10%

21 of 208 offers

Was the school full?

This is the question a panel spends most of its time on. At the second stage of an appeal it weighs the harm to the school of taking an extra child against the harm to your child of being refused — and how much room the school has is the heart of that. The admission authority has to show harm over and above the fact that its published number has been reached, so it is fair to ask what the specific harm is — how the second stage actually works.

Places, Years 7 to 11

1,050

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,008

96% of capacity

Unfilled places

42

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

481

excluded from the figures above

Read this before you use these numbers

These are whole-school figures across Years 7 to 11, not the year group you are appealing for. A school can hold spare places in its upper years while the year you want is genuinely full, and the panel will have the year-group numbers in front of it. So this does not show that Bexley Grammar School has room for your child.

They are also the school's own reported capacity, as at 1 May 2025 — a year behind the application figures further up this page, and a description rather than a finding.

On the published figures Bexley Grammar School reported 42 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 96% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Bexley Grammar School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,634 places 1,478 on roll 2011/12 1,420 places 1,451 on roll 2012/13 1,420 places 1,424 on roll 2013/14 1,634 places 1,412 on roll 2014/15 1,420 places 1,368 on roll 2015/16 1,420 places 1,404 on roll 2016/17 1,420 places 1,469 on roll 2017/18 1,420 places 1,417 on roll 2018/19 1,420 places 1,353 on roll 2020/21 1,420 places 1,428 on roll 2021/22 1,420 places 1,444 on roll 2022/23 1,420 places 1,460 on roll 2023/24 1,420 places 1,477 on roll 2024/25 1,531 places 1,499 on roll
Whole-school figures including any sixth form, as at 1 May each year. 2019/20 is missing because the 2020 School Capacity survey was cancelled.

Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Bexley Grammar School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in each of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Bexley Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
25 July 2023 Arrangements did not comply ADA4106
17 August 2021 Arrangements did not comply ADA3786

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Bexley

Postcode DA16 2BL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136369).

Other contested secondary schools in Bexley

Applications and offers: Department for Education, Primary and secondary school applications and offers, school-level file, 2026/27. Appeal figures: Admission appeals in England. Both under the Open Government Licence.