School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Holmer Green Senior School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 23 families who named Holmer Green Senior School as their first choice did not get a place: 186 put it first and 163 of them were offered one.

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

23

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

186 first preferences for 209 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Holmer Green Senior School

There is no published appeal success rate for Holmer Green Senior 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

Holmer Green Senior School turned first-choice families away in 9 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 4 of those years. In the other 5 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 Holmer Green Senior 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 0.46 per place 67 first choices 147 places 2016/17 0.82 per place 127 first choices 154 places 2017/18 1.24 per place 181 first choices 146 places 2018/19 1.19 per place 166 first choices 140 places 2019/20 0.94 per place 190 first choices 202 places 2020/21 1.03 per place 201 first choices 195 places 2021/22 0.79 per place 158 first choices 200 places 2022/23 1.07 per place 223 first choices 209 places 2023/24 0.97 per place 203 first choices 209 places 2024/25 0.95 per place 201 first choices 212 places 2025/26 0.88 per place 184 first choices 209 places 2026/27 0.89 per place 186 first choices 209 places
First preferences per place at Holmer Green Senior School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 186 first preferences for 209 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Holmer Green Senior School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 147 67 67 0.46
2016/17 154 127 118 0.82
2017/18 146 181 114 1.24
2018/19 140 166 116 1.19
2019/20 202 190 164 0.94
2020/21 195 201 151 1.03
2021/22 200 158 123 0.79
2022/23 209 223 181 1.07
2023/24 209 203 170 0.97
2024/25 212 201 171 0.95
2025/26 209 184 167 0.88
2026/27 209 186 163 0.89

Places offered

209

in 2026/27

Named first choice

186

671 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

87.6%

163 of 186

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 209 offers

How close you had to live

Holmer Green Senior School filled its places in 2026, and 2,383m — 1.48 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 5 — Distance, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

1.48 mi

2,383 metres, 2026

Under criterion

5

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.

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

1,050

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,050

100% of capacity

Unfilled places

0

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

202

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 Holmer Green Senior 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 Holmer Green Senior 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 Holmer Green Senior School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 870 places 859 on roll 2012/13 870 places 839 on roll 2013/14 870 places 836 on roll 2014/15 884 places 820 on roll 2015/16 894 places 821 on roll 2016/17 900 places 833 on roll 2017/18 930 places 879 on roll 2018/19 911 places 889 on roll 2020/21 1,011 places 1,003 on roll 2021/22 1,231 places 1,087 on roll 2022/23 1,231 places 1,147 on roll 2023/24 1,231 places 1,213 on roll 2024/25 1,252 places 1,234 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 HP15 6SP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138058).

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.