Refused a place at Heathfield Community College?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 35 families who named Heathfield Community College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 248 and 271 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.
first choices for every place available
271 first preferences for 248 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Heathfield Community College
There is no published appeal success rate for Heathfield 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.
- 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
Heathfield Community College turned first-choice families away in 8 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 207 | 183 | 183 | 0.88 |
| 2016/17 | 232 | 220 | 220 | 0.95 |
| 2017/18 | 231 | 223 | 223 | 0.97 |
| 2018/19 | 236 | 243 | 228 | 1.03 |
| 2019/20 | 235 | 258 | 228 | 1.1 |
| 2020/21 | 231 | 245 | 224 | 1.06 |
| 2021/22 | 234 | 267 | 228 | 1.14 |
| 2022/23 | 233 | 298 | 227 | 1.28 |
| 2023/24 | 232 | 240 | 226 | 1.03 |
| 2024/25 | 236 | 250 | 227 | 1.06 |
| 2025/26 | 237 | 223 | 217 | 0.94 |
| 2026/27 | 248 | 271 | 236 | 1.09 |
Places offered
248
in 2026/27
Named first choice
271
482 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
87.1%
236 of 271
Offers to families outside the council
0%
0 of 248 offers
How close you had to live
Heathfield Community College filled its places in 2025, and 11,850m — 7.36 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
7.36 mi
11,850 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
1,200
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,180
98.3% of capacity
Unfilled places
20
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
360
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 Heathfield 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 Heathfield Community College reported 20 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.3% 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, 2009/10 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
- Whether this year's cut-off will be the same. The distance above is last year's and it moves with whoever applies — it is not a boundary you can be measured against in advance, and no council publishes next year's — 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
- Community school
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- East Sussex
Postcode TN21 8RJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 114587).
Other contested secondary schools in East Sussex
- The Cavendish School 1.54 first choices per place
- St Catherine's College 1.40 first choices per place
- Claverham Community College 1.36 first choices per place
- St Richard's Catholic College 1.34 first choices per place
- Chailey School 1.26 first choices per place
- Willingdon Community School 1.20 first choices per place
- Uckfield College 1.12 first choices per place
- Seaford Head School 1.06 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.