School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at John Colet School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 29 families who named John Colet School as their first choice did not get a place: 169 put it first and 140 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.

29

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

169 first preferences for 174 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at John Colet School

There is no published appeal success rate for John Colet 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

John Colet 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 John Colet 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 0.67 per place 125 first choices 187 places 2016/17 0.8 per place 175 first choices 218 places 2017/18 1.03 per place 225 first choices 218 places 2018/19 1.22 per place 222 first choices 182 places 2019/20 1.03 per place 187 first choices 181 places 2020/21 0.89 per place 178 first choices 200 places 2021/22 0.52 per place 105 first choices 202 places 2022/23 0.99 per place 175 first choices 176 places 2023/24 0.99 per place 175 first choices 176 places 2024/25 1.02 per place 171 first choices 168 places 2025/26 0.84 per place 140 first choices 166 places 2026/27 0.97 per place 169 first choices 174 places
First preferences per place at John Colet School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 169 first preferences for 174 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at John Colet School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 187 125 119 0.67
2016/17 218 175 158 0.8
2017/18 218 225 170 1.03
2018/19 182 222 135 1.22
2019/20 181 187 142 1.03
2020/21 200 178 157 0.89
2021/22 202 105 96 0.52
2022/23 176 175 156 0.99
2023/24 176 175 150 0.99
2024/25 168 171 132 1.02
2025/26 166 140 120 0.84
2026/27 174 169 140 0.97

Places offered

174

in 2026/27

Named first choice

169

447 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.8%

140 of 169

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 174 offers

How close you had to live

John Colet School filled its places in 2026, and 4,319m — 2.68 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 6 — Distance, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

2.68 mi

4,319 metres, 2026

Under criterion

6

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 John Colet 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 John Colet 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 Children who are looked after.1
2 Children of staff who are employed on a permanent contract at the School where the member of staff has been employed at the School for two or more years at the time the application for admission is made, or the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage.
3 Children living in the catchment area of the school.
4 Siblings of children in Years 7 to 10 who are on the roll of the school at the time that the allocations are made and are expected to be on the school roll at the time of the proposed admission. For immediate In-Year (casual) admission – siblings of children in Years 7-11 at the time of admission.
5 Children who have exceptional medical or social needs which can only be met at this school supported by written evidence from a doctor, social worker, educational welfare officer or other appropriate person.
6 Once the above rules have been applied, then any further places will be offered in distance order, using the distance between the child’s normal home address, from their front door, and the school’s nearest open gate, offering the closest first. We use the straight line distance. A 'looked after child' or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangements, or special guardianship order 90 including those who appear [to the admission authority] to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted. […] criterion continues in the source document

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.

John Colet 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

960

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

960

100% of capacity

Unfilled places

0

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

154

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 John Colet 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 John Colet 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 John Colet School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 998 places 1,008 on roll 2012/13 998 places 995 on roll 2013/14 998 places 1,001 on roll 2014/15 1,020 places 988 on roll 2015/16 1,020 places 978 on roll 2016/17 1,020 places 1,006 on roll 2017/18 1,033 places 1,035 on roll 2018/19 1,033 places 1,020 on roll 2020/21 1,067 places 1,086 on roll 2021/22 1,067 places 1,118 on roll 2022/23 1,067 places 1,111 on roll 2023/24 1,067 places 1,112 on roll 2024/25 1,114 places 1,060 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 HP22 6HF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137261).

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.