School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Claverham Community College?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 86 families who named Claverham Community College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 226 and 307 put it first.

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

1.36

first choices for every place available

307 first preferences for 226 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Claverham Community College

There is no published appeal success rate for Claverham Community 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 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

Claverham Community College turned first-choice families away in 11 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 Claverham Community 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 1.31 per place 289 first choices 221 places 2016/17 1.18 per place 264 first choices 224 places 2017/18 1.2 per place 267 first choices 223 places 2018/19 1.32 per place 298 first choices 226 places 2019/20 1.22 per place 275 first choices 226 places 2020/21 1.2 per place 269 first choices 225 places 2021/22 1.17 per place 267 first choices 229 places 2022/23 1.23 per place 280 first choices 228 places 2023/24 0.99 per place 224 first choices 227 places 2024/25 1.39 per place 318 first choices 229 places 2025/26 1.5 per place 343 first choices 228 places 2026/27 1.36 per place 307 first choices 226 places
First preferences per place at Claverham Community College. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 307 first preferences for 226 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Claverham Community College, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 221 289 219 1.31
2016/17 224 264 218 1.18
2017/18 223 267 201 1.2
2018/19 226 298 222 1.32
2019/20 226 275 215 1.22
2020/21 225 269 214 1.2
2021/22 229 267 219 1.17
2022/23 228 280 220 1.23
2023/24 227 224 210 0.99
2024/25 229 318 216 1.39
2025/26 228 343 224 1.5
2026/27 226 307 221 1.36

Places offered

226

in 2026/27

Named first choice

307

703 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

72%

221 of 307

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 226 offers

How close you had to live

Claverham Community College filled its places in 2025, and 7,075m — 4.40 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 6 , which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

4.40 mi

7,075 metres, 2025

Under criterion

6

as numbered by the school

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. 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. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

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

1,150

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,151

100.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

1

reported as full or beyond

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 Claverham Community 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 Claverham Community College was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Claverham Community College from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,120 places 1,182 on roll 2010/11 1,120 places 1,158 on roll 2011/12 1,120 places 1,171 on roll 2012/13 1,120 places 1,174 on roll 2013/14 1,120 places 1,152 on roll 2014/15 1,120 places 1,153 on roll 2015/16 1,150 places 1,159 on roll 2016/17 1,150 places 1,144 on roll 2017/18 1,150 places 1,135 on roll 2018/19 1,150 places 1,141 on roll 2020/21 1,150 places 1,136 on roll 2021/22 1,150 places 1,148 on roll 2022/23 1,150 places 1,138 on roll 2023/24 1,150 places 1,132 on roll 2024/25 1,150 places 1,151 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
Community school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
East Sussex

Postcode TN33 0HT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 114584).

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.