Refused a place at Pioneer Secondary Academy?
In 2026/27, Pioneer Secondary Academy offered 128 places and 88 families named it as their first choice.
Below: what an appeal in Buckinghamshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 4 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
88 first preferences for 128 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Pioneer Secondary Academy
There is no published appeal success rate for Pioneer Secondary Academy, 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.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
Pioneer Secondary Academy turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 4 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023/24 | 116 | 55 | 54 | 0.47 |
| 2024/25 | 134 | 69 | 69 | 0.51 |
| 2025/26 | 117 | 107 | 88 | 0.91 |
| 2026/27 | 128 | 88 | 88 | 0.69 |
Places offered
128
in 2026/27
Named first choice
88
207 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
100%
88 of 88
Offers to families outside the council
71%
91 of 128 offers
How close you had to live
Every applicant was offered a place at Pioneer Secondary Academy 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
600
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
568
94.7% of capacity
Unfilled places
32
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
28
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 Pioneer Secondary Academy 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 Pioneer Secondary Academy reported 32 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 94.7% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.
Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2021/22 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- Whether places will be as open this year. Buckinghamshire published that this school offered a place to everyone who applied, so no cut-off distance exists to quote. That was those rounds, not this one — demand moves year to year — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Free schools
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- Faith
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Buckinghamshire
Postcode SL2 4QB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 149204).
Other contested secondary schools in Buckinghamshire
- Burnham Grammar School 1.92 first choices per place
- Sir William Borlase's Grammar School 1.76 first choices per place
- Royal Latin School 1.70 first choices per place
- Chesham Grammar School 1.69 first choices per place
- Aylesbury Grammar School 1.60 first choices per place
- Dr Challoner's High School 1.60 first choices per place
- John Hampden Grammar School 1.41 first choices per place
- Aylesbury High School 1.40 first choices per place
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.