Refused a place at Beaconsfield High School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 88 families who named Beaconsfield High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 186 and 252 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Buckinghamshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
252 first preferences for 186 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Beaconsfield High School
There is no published appeal success rate for Beaconsfield 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.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
Beaconsfield 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 149 | 208 | 140 | 1.4 |
| 2016/17 | 178 | 239 | 164 | 1.34 |
| 2017/18 | 180 | 213 | 157 | 1.18 |
| 2018/19 | 180 | 284 | 167 | 1.58 |
| 2019/20 | 178 | 307 | 161 | 1.72 |
| 2020/21 | 177 | 284 | 165 | 1.6 |
| 2021/22 | 181 | 413 | 169 | 2.28 |
| 2022/23 | 181 | 310 | 170 | 1.71 |
| 2023/24 | 180 | 246 | 156 | 1.37 |
| 2024/25 | 185 | 238 | 174 | 1.29 |
| 2025/26 | 185 | 272 | 173 | 1.47 |
| 2026/27 | 186 | 252 | 164 | 1.35 |
Places offered
186
in 2026/27
Named first choice
252
799 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
65.1%
164 of 252
Offers to families outside the council
3%
5 of 186 offers
How close you had to live
Beaconsfield High School filled its places in 2026, and 8,184m — 5.09 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 9 — Distance, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.
Last place offered at
5.09 mi
8,184 metres, 2026
Under criterion
9
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 Beaconsfield 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Girls who are Looked After Children or previously Looked After Children (see definition at Appendix 1) |
| 2 | Qualified girls who are living within catchment and have an entitlement to pupil premium/service premium at the time of application (31st October 2026). • For entry to Year 7: Within the existing 186 Published Admission Number (PAN), up to 10 places will be offered to girls’ resident in the catchment area who are not deemed qualified but are in receipt of Pupil Premium/service premium at the time of application and who have achieved a standardised score of at least 115 in the admissions tests. |
| 3 | Sisters (see definition at Appendix 1) of girls who live within the school’s catchment area who will be in attendance at the school at the time of application (31st October 2026) and will still be in attendance at time of entry September 2027. |
| 4 | Daughter/s of a member of Beaconsfield High School staff where a) the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, and/or b) the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant teaching post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. |
| 5 | Girls living in the catchment area of the school in order of straight-line distance from the school |
| 6 | Girls who have exceptional medical or social needs which can only be met at this school |
| 7 | Sisters (see definition at Appendix 1) of girls who live outside the school’s catchment area who will be in attendance at the school at the time of application (31st October 2026) in order of straight-line distance from the school |
| 8 | Girls not living in the catchment area of the school in order of straight-line distance from the school Explanatory Note: In order to qualify for admission under rules referring to the school’s catchment area, the girl must be resident at their home address by 1st September 2026, and it is intended that she will still be living there or within the school catchment area at the time of entry to the school. Please refer to https://www.buckinghamshire.gov.uk/schools-and- learning/schools-index/school-admissions/school-admissions-guides-policies-and- statistics/guide-to-moving-up-to-secondary-school/understanding-the-terms-we- use/#normal-home-address/ for further information. […] 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.
Beaconsfield 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
900
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
899
99.9% of capacity
Unfilled places
1
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
314
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 Beaconsfield 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 Beaconsfield High School reported 1 unfilled place across Years 7 to 11, at 99.9% 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, 2014/15 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
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. Beaconsfield High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 29 August 2017 | No fault found | ADA3293 |
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
- Whether this year's cut-off will be the same. The distance above is last year's and it moves with whoever applies — it is not a boundary you can be measured against in advance, and no council publishes next year's — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Academy converter
- Admissions policy
- Selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Buckinghamshire
Postcode HP9 1RR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140893).
Other contested secondary schools in Buckinghamshire
- Burnham Grammar School 1.92 first choices per place
- Sir William Borlase's Grammar School 1.76 first choices per place
- Royal Latin School 1.70 first choices per place
- Chesham Grammar School 1.69 first choices per place
- Aylesbury Grammar School 1.60 first choices per place
- Dr Challoner's High School 1.60 first choices per place
- John Hampden Grammar School 1.41 first choices per place
- Aylesbury High School 1.40 first choices per place
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.