School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Aylesbury Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 116 families who named Aylesbury Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 183 and 292 put it first.

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

1.60

first choices for every place available

292 first preferences for 183 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Aylesbury Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Aylesbury 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 Buckinghamshire 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 Buckinghamshire, 12% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 182 of 1,519 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 Buckinghamshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Buckinghamshire 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

Aylesbury 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 Aylesbury Grammar School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.6 1.3 1.9 2.5 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.32 per place 230 first choices 174 places 2016/17 1.72 per place 297 first choices 173 places 2017/18 1.26 per place 211 first choices 168 places 2018/19 1.59 per place 276 first choices 174 places 2019/20 1.48 per place 255 first choices 172 places 2020/21 1.47 per place 252 first choices 172 places 2021/22 2.01 per place 359 first choices 179 places 2022/23 1.45 per place 254 first choices 175 places 2023/24 1.31 per place 234 first choices 179 places 2024/25 1.56 per place 277 first choices 177 places 2025/26 1.58 per place 278 first choices 176 places 2026/27 1.6 per place 292 first choices 183 places
First preferences per place at Aylesbury Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 292 first preferences for 183 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Aylesbury 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
2015/16 174 230 154 1.32
2016/17 173 297 171 1.72
2017/18 168 211 153 1.26
2018/19 174 276 164 1.59
2019/20 172 255 148 1.48
2020/21 172 252 161 1.47
2021/22 179 359 162 2.01
2022/23 175 254 165 1.45
2023/24 179 234 161 1.31
2024/25 177 277 169 1.56
2025/26 176 278 165 1.58
2026/27 183 292 176 1.6

Places offered

183

in 2026/27

Named first choice

292

568 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

60.3%

176 of 292

Offers to families outside the council

14%

25 of 183 offers

How close you had to live

Aylesbury Grammar School filled its places in 2026, and 15,752m — 9.79 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 10 — Distance, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

9.79 mi

15,752 metres, 2026

Under criterion

10

Distance

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Buckinghamshire Council, allocation statistics for 2026. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

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

930

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

930

100% of capacity

Unfilled places

0

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

409

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 Aylesbury 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 Aylesbury 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 Aylesbury Grammar School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,305 places 1,288 on roll 2012/13 1,303 places 1,293 on roll 2013/14 1,303 places 1,293 on roll 2014/15 1,307 places 1,314 on roll 2015/16 1,307 places 1,305 on roll 2016/17 1,326 places 1,299 on roll 2017/18 1,326 places 1,292 on roll 2018/19 1,335 places 1,302 on roll 2020/21 1,345 places 1,329 on roll 2021/22 1,345 places 1,333 on roll 2022/23 1,345 places 1,334 on roll 2023/24 1,345 places 1,334 on roll 2024/25 1,339 places 1,342 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. Aylesbury Grammar School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Aylesbury Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
29 August 2017 No fault found ADA3298

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
Buckinghamshire

Postcode HP21 7RP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136884).

Other contested secondary schools in Buckinghamshire

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.