Refused a place at Dr Challoner's Grammar School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 70 families who named Dr Challoner's Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 185 and 238 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
238 first preferences for 185 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Dr Challoner's Grammar School
There is no published appeal success rate for Dr Challoner's 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
Dr Challoner's 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 | 181 | 271 | 181 | 1.5 |
| 2016/17 | 179 | 251 | 178 | 1.4 |
| 2017/18 | 181 | 274 | 179 | 1.51 |
| 2018/19 | 187 | 324 | 184 | 1.73 |
| 2019/20 | 178 | 289 | 176 | 1.62 |
| 2020/21 | 181 | 240 | 166 | 1.33 |
| 2021/22 | 181 | 365 | 177 | 2.02 |
| 2022/23 | 179 | 297 | 176 | 1.66 |
| 2023/24 | 182 | 281 | 177 | 1.54 |
| 2024/25 | 177 | 286 | 176 | 1.62 |
| 2025/26 | 177 | 278 | 170 | 1.57 |
| 2026/27 | 185 | 238 | 168 | 1.29 |
Places offered
185
in 2026/27
Named first choice
238
669 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
70.6%
168 of 238
Offers to families outside the council
6%
12 of 185 offers
How close you had to live
Dr Challoner's Grammar School filled its places in 2026, and 16,111m — 10.01 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 8 — Distance, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.
Last place offered at
10.01 mi
16,111 metres, 2026
Under criterion
8
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 Dr Challoner's Grammar School published for 2026 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 | Boys who are looked after children or previously looked after2. |
| 2 | Boys living3 in the catchment area4 of the school who meet the minimum standard in each of the tests, and who qualify for, and are in receipt of, Pupil Premium at the time of application. |
| 3 | Where places exist up to half will be reserved for boys, resident in the catchment area, who qualify for, and are in receipt of Pupil Premium, or who are looked after children or previously looked after children2, at the time of application, and who have achieved a score within 10% of the minimum standard required on each test. Should there be more eligible applicants than places available, then the distance tie-breaker will apply i.e. places will be offered to those living closest to the school (using straight line distance between the family’s normal home address and the main entrance to the school). Documentary evidence, e.g. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 4 | Sons of staff who meet the minimum standard in each of the tests, a) where 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 post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. |
| 5 | Boys living3 in the catchment area4 of the school who meet the minimum standard in each of the tests, offered in rank order of aggregate test score. |
| 6 | Boys living outside the catchment area of the school who meet the minimum qualifying standard in each of the tests offered in rank order of aggregate test score. Paragraph 5 of this policy provides further detail concerning rules relating to residency in the catchment area. Where the test score criterion does not produce a clear outcome (ie. two or more students have an identical score) the order will be determined by random allocation supervised by a person independent of the school. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 7 | Late Transfer Waiting List Boys who have qualified and have not been allocated a place may have their name placed on the waiting list. The waiting list will be ranked in accordance with the school’s Late Transfer over-subscription criteria as detailed in 3.4 above. If an applicant qualifies but cannot be allocated a place because the school is full, qualification ends 12 months after the test. The applicant must then be tested again in the next Annual Testing Round. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 8 | Under-age and over-age testing If a child is of outstanding academic ability, is exceptionally mature and has been working well with pupils in the year above his normal school year for a number of years, it may be possible for him to take the Late Transfer Test for an older year group. Similarly, it is occasionally appropriate to test a child who is over the normal age of the year group for which he is applying. This would be because in the past there were educational reasons (which have continued) for the child to be in a lower year group or because he has missed at least a year of school through being ill or living abroad. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| ● the parents’ views; | |
| ● any available information about the child’s academic, social and emotional development; | |
| ● where relevant, their medical history and the views of a medical professional; | |
| ● whether they have been previously educated out of their normal age group; | |
| ● any evidence that the child may naturally have fallen into a lower age group if it were not for being born prematurely; | |
| ● the views of the child’s current Headteacher. If you would like to apply to register an under-age or over-age child, please contact the school on admissions@challoners.org. | |
| 9 | Sixth Form (Years 12 and 13) |
| 10 | Sixth Form Entry Criteria Applications from external students (both boys and girls) should be made by completing a ‘Data Collection Form’ availa |
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 2026 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.
Dr Challoner's Grammar School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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
439
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 Dr Challoner's 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 Dr Challoner's 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, 2010/11 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. Dr Challoner's Grammar School has been the subject of 5 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in 2 of them.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 11 August 2020 | No fault found | ADA3659 |
| 31 August 2018 | Arrangements did not comply | case reference number ADA3483 |
| 29 August 2017 | No fault found | ADA3296 |
| 15 June 2016 | No fault found | ADA3116 |
| 19 September 2014 | Arrangements did not comply | ADA2747 |
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 HP6 5HA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136419).
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.