School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Great Marlow School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 55 families who named Great Marlow School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 225 and 242 put it first.

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

1.08

first choices for every place available

242 first preferences for 225 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Great Marlow School

There is no published appeal success rate for Great Marlow 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

Great Marlow School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 9 of those years. In the other 2 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at Great Marlow 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 1.31 per place 256 first choices 195 places 2016/17 1.16 per place 255 first choices 220 places 2017/18 1.2 per place 259 first choices 215 places 2018/19 1.17 per place 261 first choices 224 places 2019/20 1.23 per place 272 first choices 222 places 2020/21 1.09 per place 245 first choices 225 places 2021/22 0.74 per place 166 first choices 225 places 2022/23 1.1 per place 239 first choices 217 places 2023/24 0.97 per place 223 first choices 230 places 2024/25 1.1 per place 257 first choices 233 places 2025/26 0.98 per place 220 first choices 224 places 2026/27 1.08 per place 242 first choices 225 places
First preferences per place at Great Marlow School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 242 first preferences for 225 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Great Marlow School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 195 256 164 1.31
2016/17 220 255 189 1.16
2017/18 215 259 186 1.2
2018/19 224 261 192 1.17
2019/20 222 272 197 1.23
2020/21 225 245 194 1.09
2021/22 225 166 136 0.74
2022/23 217 239 184 1.1
2023/24 230 223 206 0.97
2024/25 233 257 199 1.1
2025/26 224 220 193 0.98
2026/27 225 242 187 1.08

Places offered

225

in 2026/27

Named first choice

242

655 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

77.3%

187 of 242

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 225 offers

How close you had to live

Every applicant was offered a place at Great Marlow School in 2026. That is the most recent round Buckinghamshire has published, and it means there was no cut-off that year — nobody was turned away for living too far, so no distance exists to be measured against.

Last place offered at

No cut-off

everyone who applied was offered, 2026

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because of how far from the school you live, and cannot allow it because you live close by. No cut-off applied here in any round Buckinghamshire has published — the school offered a place to everyone who asked for one. 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.

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.

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

1,150

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,182

102.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

32

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

251

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 Great Marlow 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 Great Marlow 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 Great Marlow School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,185 places 1,220 on roll 2012/13 1,185 places 1,199 on roll 2013/14 1,205 places 1,213 on roll 2014/15 1,226 places 1,239 on roll 2015/16 1,251 places 1,248 on roll 2016/17 1,275 places 1,271 on roll 2017/18 1,375 places 1,298 on roll 2018/19 1,371 places 1,313 on roll 2020/21 1,389 places 1,435 on roll 2021/22 1,419 places 1,444 on roll 2022/23 1,419 places 1,426 on roll 2023/24 1,419 places 1,437 on roll 2024/25 1,401 places 1,423 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.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Buckinghamshire

Postcode SL7 1JE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136964).

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.