School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 60 families who named The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 182 and 217 put it first.

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

1.19

first choices for every place available

217 first preferences for 182 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe

There is no published appeal success rate for The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, 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

The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe 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 The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, 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 1.27 per place 238 first choices 187 places 2016/17 1.56 per place 285 first choices 183 places 2017/18 1.43 per place 262 first choices 183 places 2018/19 1.45 per place 273 first choices 188 places 2019/20 1.28 per place 243 first choices 190 places 2020/21 1.67 per place 316 first choices 189 places 2021/22 1.65 per place 304 first choices 184 places 2022/23 1.2 per place 227 first choices 189 places 2023/24 1.48 per place 274 first choices 185 places 2024/25 1.14 per place 217 first choices 190 places 2025/26 1.15 per place 213 first choices 185 places 2026/27 1.19 per place 217 first choices 182 places
First preferences per place at The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 217 first preferences for 182 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 187 238 154 1.27
2016/17 183 285 174 1.56
2017/18 183 262 166 1.43
2018/19 188 273 173 1.45
2019/20 190 243 165 1.28
2020/21 189 316 184 1.67
2021/22 184 304 166 1.65
2022/23 189 227 158 1.2
2023/24 185 274 172 1.48
2024/25 190 217 166 1.14
2025/26 185 213 163 1.15
2026/27 182 217 157 1.19

Places offered

182

in 2026/27

Named first choice

217

701 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

72.4%

157 of 217

Offers to families outside the council

14%

25 of 182 offers

How close you had to live

The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe filled its places in 2026, and 21,758m — 13.52 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 7 — Distance, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

13.52 mi

21,758 metres, 2026

Under criterion

7

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 The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe published for 2027 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 The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, 2027 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 Looked after and previously looked after children.2 N
2 Applicants living in the catchment area 3 of the school who qualify for Pupil Premium. Applicants must be in receipt of FSM at the time of the application deadline . Evidence will be required.
3 Siblings of day students who are on the roll of the school at the time an application is made, and who are expected to be on the roll of the school at the time of the proposed admission.4
4 Applicants living in the catchment area of the school from 1 September of the year preceding entry to Year 7 in September until they join the school the following September. If the School is oversubscribed within this rule, then priority will be given to applicants in Priority Area A, then Priority Area B in each case using distance order to prioritise.3
5 Child of a member of staff where a) the member of staff has been employed at 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.
6 Once the rules have been applied, any further places will be offered in distance order using straight line distance between the family’s normal home address and the nearest pupil entrance to the school offering the closest first (adopted County Scheme). Where the distance criterion produces an absolute tie, each applicant will be admitted. Students who have qualified and have not been allocated a place will have their name placed on the waiting list. The waiting list will be ranked in accordance with the school’s Late Transfer Oversubscription Criteria as detailed in 6.4 above. […] criterion continues in the source document
7 SIXTH FORM (YEARS 12 and 13)
8 Sixth Form Entry Criteria Applications from external students (both boys and girls) should be made directly to the school using the application form for Sixth Form Admission, available on the school’s website. RGS Website Evidence of normal home address will be required. Minimum entry requirements (which are the same for both internal and external applicants) are GCSE grades as follows: C
● 8 taught full GCSEs at grades 5-9 including English and Mathematics at grade 5 or above and a total point score from the 8 GCSEs of a minimum of 49 points.
● In addition, candidates must meet the entry requirement for each course for which they have applied. Full details O are provided in the ‘Sixth Form Entry’ information, which is revised annually, and available on the school’s website or on request to the school. N If applicants for Sixth Form are holding qualifications other than GCSEs (for example, if they have been educated outside of the English education system) their qualifications will be assessed against GCSE points scores in accordance with guidance from UK ERIC (the designated United Kingdom national agency for the recognition and comparison of SU international qualifications and skills) and their application ranked against the […] criterion continues in the source document
9 Sixth Form Oversubscription Criteria LT Where the number of eligible external applications exceeds the number of places available, the following criteria will be applied in the order set out below to decide which students to admit.
10 Students who are looked after or previously looked after children.² AT
11 In catchment students who qualified for, and are in receipt of Pupil Premium at the time of application.
12 Academically qualified children of staff⁵ where a) the member of staff has been employed at 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.
13 Rank order of those with the highest aggregate score in their best 8 GCSEs, provided their course preferences can IO be met. Places will be offered using the over-subscription criteria until planned capacity in a given subject or course is reached and the school reserves the right to refuse access to subjects when planned classes are full. N If the GCSE points criterion does not produce a clear outcome (i.e. two students achieve precisely the same score), the place will be determined by random allocation supervised by a person independent of the school. Random Allocation Procedure | Buckinghamshire Council
14 REQUESTS FOR ADMISSION OUTSIDE NORMAL AGE GROUP
15 Parents have a right to request for their son to be admitted to a year group other than their son's normal year group according to their age. The Governing Body will consider these requests and decide whether to agree to the request in principle. These requests are not applications for admission, which must still be made in the usual way.
16 The Governing Body will make these decisions based on the circumstances of each case and in the best interests of the applicant concerned. This will include having regard to:
● the parents’ views;
● the applicant’s academic, social and emotional developm

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 2027 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 Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

978

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,002

102.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

24

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

399

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 Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe 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 Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,356 places 1,357 on roll 2011/12 1,371 places 1,372 on roll 2012/13 1,371 places 1,364 on roll 2013/14 1,371 places 1,373 on roll 2014/15 1,371 places 1,374 on roll 2015/16 1,371 places 1,385 on roll 2016/17 1,377 places 1,376 on roll 2017/18 1,377 places 1,363 on roll 2018/19 1,377 places 1,366 on roll 2020/21 1,388 places 1,429 on roll 2021/22 1,374 places 1,432 on roll 2022/23 1,374 places 1,424 on roll 2023/24 1,374 places 1,418 on roll 2024/25 1,377 places 1,409 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
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Buckinghamshire

Postcode HP13 6QT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136484).

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.