Refused a place at Chesham Grammar School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 133 families who named Chesham Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 183 and 309 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
309 first preferences for 183 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Chesham Grammar School
There is no published appeal success rate for Chesham 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.
- 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
Chesham 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 179 | 256 | 158 | 1.43 |
| 2016/17 | 178 | 230 | 163 | 1.29 |
| 2017/18 | 180 | 292 | 174 | 1.62 |
| 2018/19 | 177 | 254 | 153 | 1.44 |
| 2019/20 | 186 | 287 | 174 | 1.54 |
| 2020/21 | 184 | 250 | 166 | 1.36 |
| 2021/22 | 185 | 414 | 167 | 2.24 |
| 2022/23 | 183 | 229 | 151 | 1.25 |
| 2023/24 | 181 | 242 | 149 | 1.34 |
| 2024/25 | 182 | 225 | 154 | 1.24 |
| 2025/26 | 178 | 262 | 156 | 1.47 |
| 2026/27 | 183 | 309 | 176 | 1.69 |
Places offered
183
in 2026/27
Named first choice
309
1,080 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
57%
176 of 309
Offers to families outside the council
26%
47 of 183 offers
How close you had to live
Chesham Grammar School filled its places in 2026, and 5,987m — 3.72 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
3.72 mi
5,987 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 Chesham Grammar 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 | Looked after children and previously looked after1 children. |
| 2 | Up to 6 places in Year 7 will be available to children living in the catchment area of the school as at and continuously from 1st September of the year preceding entry to Year 7 in September who: |
| • qualify for and are in receipt of Pupil Premium2 at the time of application, whose standardised score in the Secondary Transfer Test is between 110 and 120 inclusive (i.e. up to 11 marks below the threshold required for other applicants of 121) and | |
| • who have not been deemed to have qualified following a selection review or have not applied for selection review. In this category, looked after and previously looked after children will be prioritised over other children. If the number of eligible children exceeds the number of places, distance from the school will be used to determine allocation (see 4.8) | |
| 3 | Children living in the catchment area3 of the school as at and continuously from 1st September of the year preceding entry to Year 7 in September who qualify for Pupil Premium as at the time of application4. A 'looked after child' is one who is in the care of a local authority or being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions. A 'previously looked after child' is one who was looked after in England, but ceased to be so because they were adopted, or became subject to a child arrangements or special guardianship order, as well as one who appears to the Trust to have been in state care outside of England (i.e. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 4 | Qualified children of CGS staff employed on a permanent contract by the school for at least two years at the time of application, or where the member of staff has been recruited to fill a post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage. This does not include staff who work at or on the school site for other employers. |
| 5 | Children living in the catchment area of the school as at and continuously from 1st September of the year preceding entry to Year 7. |
| 6 | Children who have exceptional medical or social needs which can only be met at this school supported by evidence from an independent professional person6. |
| 7 | Once the above rules have been applied, then any further places will be offered in distance order using straight line distance between the family’s normal home address and the main entrance to the school on White Hill. Where the school can take some, but not all, of the children who qualify under one of these rules, we will give priority by taking account of the next rule (or rules) in the numbered list. |
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.
Chesham Grammar 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
915
101.7% of capacity
Over its capacity by
15
reported as full or beyond
Sixth form places
381
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 Chesham 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 Chesham 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
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. Chesham Grammar School has been the subject of 3 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 11 August 2020 | No fault found | ADA3658 |
| 15 May 2018 | Arrangements did not comply | ADA3364 |
| 29 August 2017 | No fault found | ADA3300 |
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 HP5 1BA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137091).
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
- 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
- Sir Henry Floyd Grammar School 1.39 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.