School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Aylesbury High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 88 families who named Aylesbury High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 191 and 268 put it first.

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

1.40

first choices for every place available

268 first preferences for 191 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Aylesbury High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Aylesbury High 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 High 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 High 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 1.41 per place 244 first choices 173 places 2016/17 1.34 per place 238 first choices 178 places 2017/18 1.49 per place 264 first choices 177 places 2018/19 1.57 per place 240 first choices 153 places 2019/20 1.65 per place 283 first choices 172 places 2020/21 1.73 per place 297 first choices 172 places 2021/22 2.02 per place 340 first choices 168 places 2022/23 1.3 per place 221 first choices 170 places 2023/24 1.5 per place 261 first choices 174 places 2024/25 1.29 per place 233 first choices 181 places 2025/26 1.47 per place 274 first choices 187 places 2026/27 1.4 per place 268 first choices 191 places
First preferences per place at Aylesbury High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 268 first preferences for 191 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Aylesbury High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 173 244 158 1.41
2016/17 178 238 175 1.34
2017/18 177 264 170 1.49
2018/19 153 240 141 1.57
2019/20 172 283 158 1.65
2020/21 172 297 170 1.73
2021/22 168 340 151 2.02
2022/23 170 221 148 1.3
2023/24 174 261 172 1.5
2024/25 181 233 168 1.29
2025/26 187 274 172 1.47
2026/27 191 268 180 1.4

Places offered

191

in 2026/27

Named first choice

268

554 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

67.2%

180 of 268

Offers to families outside the council

20%

39 of 191 offers

How close you had to live

Aylesbury High School filled its places in 2026, and 20,501m — 12.74 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 7 — Distance, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

12.74 mi

20,501 metres, 2026

Under criterion

7

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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Aylesbury High School published for 2027 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for Aylesbury High School, 2027 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Looked After Child, Previously Looked After Child, Internationally Adopted ChildorInternationallyAdoptedPreviouslyLookedAfterChildatthetimeof application.
2 Girls who qualify for Free School Meals as at the application deadline and who live within catchment of the school as at and continuously from 1 September of the year preceding entry to Year 12 in September.
3 Children6 of Aylesbury High School staff, who have been employed on a permanent contractbytheschoolfortwoormoreyearsatthetimeofthe applicationforadmissiontotheschoolismade,and/orthememberofstaff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage, as per national shortage occupation lists for teaching staff or as evidencedbyfewerthan3candidatesapplyingforsaidrolewhenadvertised for non-teaching staff.
4 GirlstobeofferedinrankorderofGCSEoriGCSEaggregatescorefortheir best eight subjects including Maths and English. The definitions stated above for looked after children, previously looked after children, internationallyadoptedpreviouslylookedafterchildren, andhomeaddressapplyequallyto candidates applying for admission to Year 12. Once the above rules have been applied and if there were to be a tie within any of the above rules, places will be allocated by reference to the distance between the applicant girl'shomeaddress(asdefinedbythispolicy)andthemiddleoftheschool'smainentrance gateonWaltonRoadinastraightline,withthoselivingclosestreceivinghigherpriority.The point from which distance is […] criterion continues in the source document

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2027 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

Aylesbury High School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

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

912

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

931

102.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

19

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

440

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 High 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 High 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 High 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 1,310 places 1,311 on roll 2012/13 1,310 places 1,285 on roll 2013/14 1,310 places 1,284 on roll 2014/15 1,289 places 1,286 on roll 2015/16 1,301 places 1,284 on roll 2016/17 1,301 places 1,289 on roll 2017/18 1,301 places 1,302 on roll 2018/19 1,301 places 1,298 on roll 2020/21 1,301 places 1,292 on roll 2021/22 1,301 places 1,307 on roll 2022/23 1,301 places 1,301 on roll 2023/24 1,301 places 1,322 on roll 2024/25 1,352 places 1,358 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 High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Aylesbury High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
29 August 2017 No fault found ADA3297

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 7SX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136846).

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.