School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Dr Challoner's High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 118 families who named Dr Challoner's High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 189 and 302 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

302 first preferences for 189 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Dr Challoner's High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Dr Challoner's 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

Dr Challoner's 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 Dr Challoner's High School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.3 per place 234 first choices 180 places 2016/17 1.17 per place 210 first choices 180 places 2017/18 1.47 per place 264 first choices 179 places 2018/19 1.7 per place 306 first choices 180 places 2019/20 1.59 per place 286 first choices 180 places 2020/21 1.71 per place 308 first choices 180 places 2021/22 1.61 per place 289 first choices 180 places 2022/23 1.51 per place 271 first choices 179 places 2023/24 1.81 per place 336 first choices 186 places 2024/25 1.68 per place 309 first choices 184 places 2025/26 1.52 per place 285 first choices 188 places 2026/27 1.6 per place 302 first choices 189 places
First preferences per place at Dr Challoner's High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 302 first preferences for 189 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Dr Challoner's 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
2015/16 180 234 179 1.3
2016/17 180 210 165 1.17
2017/18 179 264 174 1.47
2018/19 180 306 175 1.7
2019/20 180 286 177 1.59
2020/21 180 308 175 1.71
2021/22 180 289 165 1.61
2022/23 179 271 170 1.51
2023/24 186 336 184 1.81
2024/25 184 309 182 1.68
2025/26 188 285 182 1.52
2026/27 189 302 184 1.6

Places offered

189

in 2026/27

Named first choice

302

703 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

60.9%

184 of 302

Offers to families outside the council

2%

4 of 189 offers

How close you had to live

Dr Challoner's High School filled its places in 2026, and 5,451m — 3.39 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 6 — Non-catchment Siblings, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

3.39 mi

5,451 metres, 2026

Under criterion

6

Non-catchment Siblings

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 High 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Dr Challoner's High School, 2026 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, Previously Looked After, Internationally Adopted and Internationally Adopted Previously Looked After girls (LAC/Post-LAC, IAC, or IAPLAC).5
2 Girls in receipt of Pupil Premium, who qualify and live in the Catchment Area of the school on or before 1st April in the calendar year preceeding the year of entry (for admission in September 2026, this is 1st April 2025).6
3 Within the existing 180 Admission Number, in Year 7 up to 12 places to girls, within the existing PAN of 180, resident in the Catchment Area7, who are in receipt of Pupil Premium, or who are LAC/Post-LAC, IAC, or IAPLAC8, at the time of application, and who have achieved a standardised score of at least 115 in the admissions tests. If not all 12 places are filled, then up to six of these 12 places will be made available to girls, resident in the Catchment Area9, who are in receipt of Pupil Premium, or who are LAC/Post-LAC, IAC, or IAPLAC10, at the time of application, and who have achieved a standardised score of between 110-114 in the admissions tests, and whose score would not otherwise […] criterion continues in the source document
4 Daughters of staff who work at the school (teaching and support) 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 where the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage (please refer to our

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 High 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

944

104.9% of capacity

Over its capacity by

44

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

398

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 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 Dr Challoner's 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 Dr Challoner's 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 1,050 places 1,061 on roll 2012/13 1,050 places 1,071 on roll 2013/14 1,110 places 1,070 on roll 2014/15 1,110 places 1,065 on roll 2015/16 1,140 places 1,110 on roll 2016/17 1,138 places 1,133 on roll 2017/18 1,143 places 1,180 on roll 2018/19 1,199 places 1,220 on roll 2020/21 1,280 places 1,243 on roll 2021/22 1,280 places 1,288 on roll 2022/23 1,280 places 1,286 on roll 2023/24 1,280 places 1,313 on roll 2024/25 1,298 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. Dr Challoner's High School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Dr Challoner's High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
11 August 2020 No fault found ADA3660
29 August 2017 No fault found ADA3295

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 HP7 9QB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137219).

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.