School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Townley Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 58 families who named Townley Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: 190 put it first and 132 of them were offered one.

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

58

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

190 first preferences for 246 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Townley Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Townley 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

Townley Grammar School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 10 of those years. In the other 2 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at Townley Grammar School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.25 per place 259 first choices 208 places 2016/17 1.2 per place 267 first choices 223 places 2017/18 1.15 per place 255 first choices 222 places 2018/19 1.52 per place 341 first choices 224 places 2019/20 1.27 per place 285 first choices 224 places 2020/21 1.24 per place 278 first choices 224 places 2021/22 1.95 per place 436 first choices 224 places 2022/23 1.16 per place 260 first choices 224 places 2023/24 1.04 per place 232 first choices 224 places 2024/25 1 per place 249 first choices 248 places 2025/26 0.91 per place 223 first choices 244 places 2026/27 0.77 per place 190 first choices 246 places
First preferences per place at Townley Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 190 first preferences for 246 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Townley 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
2015/16 208 259 173 1.25
2016/17 223 267 182 1.2
2017/18 222 255 156 1.15
2018/19 224 341 191 1.52
2019/20 224 285 190 1.27
2020/21 224 278 184 1.24
2021/22 224 436 165 1.95
2022/23 224 260 164 1.16
2023/24 224 232 156 1.04
2024/25 248 249 179 1
2025/26 244 223 153 0.91
2026/27 246 190 132 0.77

Places offered

246

in 2026/27

Named first choice

190

902 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

69.5%

132 of 190

Offers to families outside the council

63%

154 of 246 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

1,120

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,120

100% of capacity

Unfilled places

0

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

550

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 Townley 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 Townley Grammar School was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Townley Grammar School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,550 places 1,518 on roll 2012/13 1,550 places 1,511 on roll 2013/14 1,550 places 1,430 on roll 2014/15 1,550 places 1,439 on roll 2015/16 1,550 places 1,501 on roll 2016/17 1,550 places 1,546 on roll 2017/18 1,550 places 1,543 on roll 2018/19 1,550 places 1,585 on roll 2020/21 1,550 places 1,612 on roll 2021/22 1,550 places 1,613 on roll 2022/23 1,550 places 1,571 on roll 2023/24 1,550 places 1,600 on roll 2024/25 1,670 places 1,668 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. Townley Grammar School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Townley Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
17 January 2020 Arrangements did not comply ADA3533

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 DA6 7AB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137769).

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.