Refused a place at Houstone School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 32 families who named Houstone School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 184 and 209 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Central Bedfordshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 1 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
209 first preferences for 184 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Houstone School
There is no published appeal success rate for Houstone 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 Central Bedfordshire 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 Central Bedfordshire, 37.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 121 of 325 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 Central Bedfordshire.
What a panel here can act on
These are national rules, not Central Bedfordshire 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
Houstone School turned first-choice families away in its first and only year of published figures. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
Only one year of published figures exist for this school, so there is nothing to plot yet. The figures themselves are below.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026/27 | 184 | 209 | 177 | 1.14 |
Places offered
184
in 2026/27
Named first choice
209
322 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
84.7%
177 of 209
Offers to families outside the council
2%
4 of 183 offers
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
900
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
656
72.9% of capacity
Unfilled places
244
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 Houstone 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 Houstone School reported 244 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 72.9% 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, 2022/23 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
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. Central Bedfordshire does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — 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
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Central Bedfordshire
Postcode LU5 5PX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 149107).
Other contested secondary schools in Central Bedfordshire
- Stratton School 1.02 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.