School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Stratton School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 2 families who named Stratton School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 131 and 133 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.

1.02

first choices for every place available

133 first preferences for 131 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Stratton School

There is no published appeal success rate for Stratton 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.

How contested this school has been

Stratton 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
Places, first preferences and offers at Stratton School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2026/27 131 133 131 1.02

Places offered

131

in 2026/27

Named first choice

133

224 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

98.5%

131 of 133

Offers to families outside the council

2%

2 of 131 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

1,140

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

852

74.7% of capacity

Unfilled places

288

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

180

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 Stratton 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 Stratton School reported 288 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 74.7% 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 Stratton School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,263 places 1,270 on roll 2012/13 1,265 places 1,214 on roll 2013/14 1,320 places 1,208 on roll 2014/15 1,320 places 1,182 on roll 2015/16 1,320 places 1,110 on roll 2016/17 1,220 places 1,102 on roll 2017/18 1,490 places 1,053 on roll 2018/19 1,490 places 968 on roll 2020/21 1,490 places 858 on roll 2021/22 1,490 places 830 on roll 2022/23 1,320 places 825 on roll 2023/24 1,320 places 777 on roll 2024/25 1,320 places 985 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
Central Bedfordshire

Postcode SG18 8JB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137886).

Other contested secondary schools in Central Bedfordshire

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.