School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Ark Alexandra Academy?

In 2026/27, Ark Alexandra Academy offered 223 places and 177 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.79

first choices for every place available

177 first preferences for 223 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Ark Alexandra Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Ark Alexandra Academy, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for East Sussex 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 East Sussex, 24.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 153 of 632 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 East Sussex.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not East Sussex 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

Ark Alexandra Academy turned first-choice families away in 2 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 Ark Alexandra Academy, 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 0.94 per place 95 first choices 101 places 2016/17 0.9 per place 69 first choices 77 places 2017/18 0.31 per place 41 first choices 132 places 2018/19 0.37 per place 64 first choices 172 places 2019/20 0.44 per place 131 first choices 299 places 2020/21 0.75 per place 222 first choices 297 places 2021/22 0.82 per place 227 first choices 277 places 2022/23 0.92 per place 324 first choices 351 places 2023/24 1.04 per place 371 first choices 357 places 2024/25 1.18 per place 419 first choices 355 places 2025/26 0.75 per place 172 first choices 229 places 2026/27 0.79 per place 177 first choices 223 places
First preferences per place at Ark Alexandra Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 177 first preferences for 223 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Ark Alexandra Academy, 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 95 95 0.94
2016/17 77 69 69 0.9
2017/18 132 41 41 0.31
2018/19 172 64 64 0.37
2019/20 299 131 131 0.44
2020/21 297 222 222 0.75
2021/22 277 227 227 0.82
2022/23 351 324 322 0.92
2023/24 357 371 338 1.04
2024/25 355 419 324 1.18
2025/26 229 172 172 0.75
2026/27 223 177 177 0.79

Places offered

223

in 2026/27

Named first choice

177

358 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

177 of 177

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 206 offers

How close you had to live

Every applicant was offered a place at Ark Alexandra Academy in 2025. That is the most recent round East Sussex has published, and it means there was no cut-off that year — nobody was turned away for living too far, so no distance exists to be measured against.

Last place offered at

No cut-off

everyone who applied was offered, 2025

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because of how far from the school you live, and cannot allow it because you live close by. No cut-off applied here in any round East Sussex has published — the school offered a place to everyone who asked for one. 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.

East Sussex Council, allocation statistics for 2025. 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

1,800

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,357

75.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

443

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

300

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 Ark Alexandra Academy 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 Ark Alexandra Academy reported 443 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 75.4% 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Ark Alexandra Academy from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,050 2,100 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 1,350 places 1,029 on roll 2014/15 1,400 places 909 on roll 2015/16 1,400 places 801 on roll 2016/17 1,350 places 692 on roll 2017/18 1,350 places 585 on roll 2018/19 1,350 places 554 on roll 2020/21 2,050 places 1,375 on roll 2021/22 2,100 places 1,429 on roll 2022/23 2,100 places 1,535 on roll 2023/24 2,100 places 1,491 on roll 2024/25 2,100 places 1,381 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. Ark Alexandra Academy has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Ark Alexandra Academy. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
24 July 2023 No fault found ADA4156

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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
East Sussex

Postcode TN34 2PG. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139821).

Other contested secondary schools in East Sussex

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.