School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Wycombe High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 106 families who named Wycombe High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 190 and 263 put it first.

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

1.38

first choices for every place available

263 first preferences for 190 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Wycombe High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Wycombe High 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

Wycombe High 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 Wycombe High 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 1.33 per place 257 first choices 193 places 2016/17 1.52 per place 290 first choices 191 places 2017/18 1.34 per place 256 first choices 191 places 2018/19 1.41 per place 270 first choices 191 places 2019/20 1.36 per place 261 first choices 192 places 2020/21 1.41 per place 268 first choices 190 places 2021/22 1.97 per place 374 first choices 190 places 2022/23 1.15 per place 219 first choices 190 places 2023/24 1.13 per place 219 first choices 193 places 2024/25 1.28 per place 244 first choices 191 places 2025/26 1.19 per place 227 first choices 191 places 2026/27 1.38 per place 263 first choices 190 places
First preferences per place at Wycombe High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 263 first preferences for 190 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Wycombe High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 193 257 170 1.33
2016/17 191 290 175 1.52
2017/18 191 256 152 1.34
2018/19 191 270 167 1.41
2019/20 192 261 157 1.36
2020/21 190 268 166 1.41
2021/22 190 374 160 1.97
2022/23 190 219 155 1.15
2023/24 193 219 154 1.13
2024/25 191 244 172 1.28
2025/26 191 227 153 1.19
2026/27 190 263 157 1.38

Places offered

190

in 2026/27

Named first choice

263

720 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

59.7%

157 of 263

Offers to families outside the council

29%

56 of 190 offers

How close you had to live

Wycombe High School filled its places in 2026, and 12,957m — 8.05 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 9 — Priority Area B, which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

8.05 mi

12,957 metres, 2026

Under criterion

9

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

960

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

954

99.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

6

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

413

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 Wycombe High 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 Wycombe High School reported 6 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.4% 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Wycombe High School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,265 places 1,297 on roll 2011/12 1,300 places 1,332 on roll 2012/13 1,300 places 1,310 on roll 2013/14 1,300 places 1,302 on roll 2014/15 1,300 places 1,312 on roll 2015/16 1,300 places 1,344 on roll 2016/17 1,361 places 1,347 on roll 2017/18 1,361 places 1,307 on roll 2018/19 1,340 places 1,304 on roll 2020/21 1,340 places 1,304 on roll 2021/22 1,340 places 1,317 on roll 2022/23 1,340 places 1,321 on roll 2023/24 1,340 places 1,320 on roll 2024/25 1,373 places 1,360 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. Wycombe High School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Wycombe High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
10 July 2019 No fault found ADA3600-02
29 August 2017 No fault found ADA3291

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 1TB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136723).

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.