School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Orchard Park High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 29 families who named Orchard Park High School as their first choice did not get a place: 139 put it first and 110 of them were offered one.

Below: what an appeal in Croydon actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 11 years of official figures.

29

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

139 first preferences for 145 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Orchard Park High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Orchard Park 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 Croydon 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 Croydon, 8.1% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 13 of 160 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 Croydon.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Croydon 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

Orchard Park High School turned first-choice families away in 2 of the last 11 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at Orchard Park High School, 2016/17 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 16/17 18/19 20/21 22/23 24/25 26/27 2016/17 0.54 per place 101 first choices 186 places 2017/18 0.48 per place 81 first choices 170 places 2018/19 0.55 per place 77 first choices 139 places 2019/20 0.56 per place 68 first choices 121 places 2020/21 0.46 per place 75 first choices 163 places 2021/22 0.52 per place 61 first choices 118 places 2022/23 0.27 per place 40 first choices 146 places 2023/24 0.55 per place 82 first choices 148 places 2024/25 0.63 per place 95 first choices 150 places 2025/26 0.88 per place 130 first choices 148 places 2026/27 0.96 per place 139 first choices 145 places
First preferences per place at Orchard Park High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 139 first preferences for 145 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Orchard Park 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
2016/17 186 101 100 0.54
2017/18 170 81 81 0.48
2018/19 139 77 77 0.55
2019/20 121 68 65 0.56
2020/21 163 75 75 0.46
2021/22 118 61 61 0.52
2022/23 146 40 40 0.27
2023/24 148 82 81 0.55
2024/25 150 95 95 0.63
2025/26 148 130 106 0.88
2026/27 145 139 110 0.96

Places offered

145

in 2026/27

Named first choice

139

601 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

79.1%

110 of 139

Offers to families outside the council

6%

8 of 145 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

1,204

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

638

53% of capacity

Unfilled places

566

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 Orchard Park 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 Orchard Park High School reported 566 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 53% 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, 2015/16 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Orchard Park High School from 2015/16 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2015/16 1,239 places 1,104 on roll 2016/17 1,239 places 1,061 on roll 2017/18 1,239 places 912 on roll 2018/19 1,239 places 753 on roll 2020/21 1,200 places 663 on roll 2021/22 1,200 places 651 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 620 on roll 2023/24 1,200 places 639 on roll 2024/25 1,204 places 638 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Croydon

Postcode CR0 7NJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 142040).

Other contested secondary schools in Croydon

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.