School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bassingbourn Village College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 6 families who named Bassingbourn Village College as their first choice did not get a place: 114 put it first and 108 of them were offered one.

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

6

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

114 first preferences for 120 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bassingbourn Village College

There is no published appeal success rate for Bassingbourn Village College, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Cambridgeshire 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 Cambridgeshire, 29.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 274 of 936 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 Cambridgeshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Cambridgeshire 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

Bassingbourn Village College turned first-choice families away in 5 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Bassingbourn Village College, 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 0.93 per place 94 first choices 101 places 2016/17 0.94 per place 98 first choices 104 places 2017/18 0.96 per place 92 first choices 96 places 2018/19 1.05 per place 118 first choices 112 places 2019/20 1.03 per place 119 first choices 116 places 2020/21 0.89 per place 100 first choices 112 places 2021/22 0.92 per place 109 first choices 119 places 2022/23 0.86 per place 96 first choices 112 places 2023/24 1.07 per place 128 first choices 120 places 2024/25 1.03 per place 119 first choices 116 places 2025/26 1.03 per place 123 first choices 119 places 2026/27 0.95 per place 114 first choices 120 places
First preferences per place at Bassingbourn Village College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 114 first preferences for 120 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bassingbourn Village College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 101 94 94 0.93
2016/17 104 98 97 0.94
2017/18 96 92 90 0.96
2018/19 112 118 105 1.05
2019/20 116 119 106 1.03
2020/21 112 100 97 0.89
2021/22 119 109 109 0.92
2022/23 112 96 96 0.86
2023/24 120 128 112 1.07
2024/25 116 119 98 1.03
2025/26 119 123 106 1.03
2026/27 120 114 108 0.95

Places offered

120

in 2026/27

Named first choice

114

217 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

94.7%

108 of 114

Offers to families outside the council

38%

46 of 120 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Bassingbourn Village College published for 2026 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 Bassingbourn Village College, 2026 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 Children In Care*, sometimes known as Looked After Children*, and previously Looked After Children.
2 Children who live in our catchment, who attend one of our feeder* schools, and who have a sibling* already here.
3 Children who live in our catchment, and who have a sibling already here.
4 Children who live in our catchment and attend one of our feeder schools.
5 All other children who live in our catchment.
6 Children of school staff members *
7 Children who live outside our catchment but attend one of our feeders and already have a sibling here.
8 Children who live outside our catchment but have a sibling here.
9 Children who live outside our catchment but attend one of our feeder schools.
10 Any other children, ranked according to distance*. (* See NOTES, below for more detailed descriptions of how we use these terms)

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 2026 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.

Bassingbourn Village College's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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

751

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

660

87.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

91

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

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 Bassingbourn Village College 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 Bassingbourn Village College reported 91 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 87.9% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Bassingbourn Village College from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 400 800 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 750 places 641 on roll 2012/13 750 places 622 on roll 2013/14 750 places 601 on roll 2014/15 750 places 599 on roll 2015/16 625 places 596 on roll 2016/17 625 places 603 on roll 2017/18 625 places 607 on roll 2018/19 625 places 639 on roll 2020/21 750 places 661 on roll 2021/22 750 places 672 on roll 2022/23 750 places 670 on roll 2023/24 750 places 662 on roll 2024/25 751 places 660 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
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Cambridgeshire

Postcode SG8 5NJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137427).

Other contested secondary schools in Cambridgeshire

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.