School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at John Hampden Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 98 families who named John Hampden Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 184 and 259 put it first.

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

1.41

first choices for every place available

259 first preferences for 184 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at John Hampden Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for John Hampden 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.

How contested this school has been

John Hampden 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.

First preferences per place at John Hampden Grammar 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 1.32 per place 196 first choices 148 places 2016/17 1.31 per place 210 first choices 160 places 2017/18 1.44 per place 218 first choices 151 places 2018/19 1.5 per place 222 first choices 148 places 2019/20 1.18 per place 210 first choices 178 places 2020/21 1.09 per place 189 first choices 173 places 2021/22 1.72 per place 304 first choices 177 places 2022/23 1.18 per place 206 first choices 175 places 2023/24 1.18 per place 211 first choices 179 places 2024/25 1.36 per place 247 first choices 181 places 2025/26 1.18 per place 213 first choices 180 places 2026/27 1.41 per place 259 first choices 184 places
First preferences per place at John Hampden Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 259 first preferences for 184 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at John Hampden Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 148 196 117 1.32
2016/17 160 210 127 1.31
2017/18 151 218 119 1.44
2018/19 148 222 118 1.5
2019/20 178 210 127 1.18
2020/21 173 189 106 1.09
2021/22 177 304 117 1.72
2022/23 175 206 135 1.18
2023/24 179 211 119 1.18
2024/25 181 247 159 1.36
2025/26 180 213 139 1.18
2026/27 184 259 161 1.41

Places offered

184

in 2026/27

Named first choice

259

865 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

62.2%

161 of 259

Offers to families outside the council

29%

53 of 184 offers

How close you had to live

John Hampden Grammar School filled its places in 2026, and 18,498m — 11.49 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 8 — Priority Area B, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

11.49 mi

18,498 metres, 2026

Under criterion

8

Priority Area B

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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

922

102.4% of capacity

Over its capacity by

22

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

348

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 Hampden 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 John Hampden 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at John Hampden Grammar 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 1,003 places 1,080 on roll 2012/13 1,050 places 1,063 on roll 2013/14 1,050 places 1,053 on roll 2014/15 1,050 places 1,025 on roll 2015/16 1,050 places 1,062 on roll 2016/17 1,050 places 1,072 on roll 2017/18 1,050 places 1,045 on roll 2018/19 1,050 places 1,081 on roll 2020/21 1,050 places 1,154 on roll 2021/22 1,050 places 1,206 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 1,222 on roll 2023/24 1,260 places 1,257 on roll 2024/25 1,248 places 1,271 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. John Hampden Grammar School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming John Hampden Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
17 July 2019 No fault found case reference number ADA3566 to 3569
29 August 2017 No fault found ADA3292

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 HP11 1SZ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136771).

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.