Refused a place at The Aylesbury Vale Academy?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 8 families who named The Aylesbury Vale Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 145 put it first and 137 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.
first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27
145 first preferences for 189 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at The Aylesbury Vale Academy
There is no published appeal success rate for The Aylesbury Vale 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
The Aylesbury Vale Academy turned first-choice families away in 3 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 1 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 178 | 101 | 101 | 0.57 |
| 2016/17 | 204 | 90 | 90 | 0.44 |
| 2017/18 | 224 | 122 | 122 | 0.54 |
| 2018/19 | 237 | 78 | 78 | 0.33 |
| 2019/20 | 272 | 85 | 85 | 0.31 |
| 2020/21 | 198 | 97 | 97 | 0.49 |
| 2021/22 | 193 | 102 | 91 | 0.53 |
| 2022/23 | 188 | 106 | 106 | 0.56 |
| 2023/24 | 165 | 173 | 127 | 1.05 |
| 2024/25 | 195 | 148 | 132 | 0.76 |
| 2025/26 | 193 | 159 | 151 | 0.82 |
| 2026/27 | 189 | 145 | 137 | 0.77 |
Places offered
189
in 2026/27
Named first choice
145
446 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
94.5%
137 of 145
Offers to families outside the council
0%
0 of 189 offers
How close you had to live
Every applicant was offered a place at The Aylesbury Vale 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.
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria The Aylesbury Vale Academy published for 2028 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Looked-after children and children who were previously looked after, including those children who appear to have been in state care outside England, but ceased to be so as a result of being adopted. (See Note 2) |
| 2 | Children of staff at the Aylesbury Vale Academy in either or both of the following circumstances: |
| a) where the member of staff has been employed by the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made and/or | |
| b) the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. | |
| 3 | Normal admission rounds: Children with a normal home address (See Note 4) in the defined catchment area and with a sibling (See Note 5) on the school roll in Reception, Years 1-5, and Years 7-10 at the time of application and who are expected to still be in attendance on the date of the proposed admission. In-year/casual admissions (outside of the normal admission rounds): Children with a normal home address in the defined catchment area and with a sibling on the school roll in Reception and Years 1-13 at the time of application and who are expected to still be in attendance on the date of the proposed admission. |
| 4 | Children with a normal home address in the school’s catchment area. |
| 5 | Families who have exceptional medical or social needs that make it essential that their child attends the Aylesbury Vale Academy rather than any other school. These needs must be fully supported by written evidence from the appropriate professional person involved with the family (see Note 3). |
| 6 | Normal admission rounds: Children with a normal home address (See Note 4) outside the defined catchment area and with a sibling (See Note 5) on the school roll in Reception, Years 1-5 and Years 7-10 at the time of application and who are expected to still be in attendance on the date of the proposed admission. In-year/casual admissions (outside of the normal admission rounds): Children with a normal home address outside the defined catchment area and with a sibling on the school roll in Reception and Years 1-13 at the time of application and who are expected to still be in attendance on the date of the proposed admission. |
| 7 | Other children. |
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 2028 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.
The Aylesbury Vale Academy's determined admission arrangements for 2028 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
1,650
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,665
100.9% of capacity
Over its capacity by
15
reported as full or beyond
Sixth form places
152
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 The Aylesbury Vale 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 The Aylesbury Vale Academy 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25
Places Pupils on roll
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. The Aylesbury Vale Academy has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 15 June 2026 | Arrangements did not comply | ADA4615 |
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
- 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
- Academy sponsor led
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- Faith
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Buckinghamshire
Postcode HP18 0WS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 135879).
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.