School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Beauchamps High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 16 families who named Beauchamps High School as their first choice did not get a place: 266 put it first and 250 of them were offered one.

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

16

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

266 first preferences for 274 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Beauchamps High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Beauchamps 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 Essex 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 Essex, 15.1% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 249 of 1,651 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 Essex.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Essex 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

Beauchamps High School turned first-choice families away in 7 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 Beauchamps High School, 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 1.02 per place 239 first choices 234 places 2016/17 0.95 per place 218 first choices 229 places 2017/18 1.02 per place 239 first choices 234 places 2018/19 1 per place 242 first choices 243 places 2019/20 0.84 per place 208 first choices 247 places 2020/21 0.86 per place 205 first choices 238 places 2021/22 1.13 per place 281 first choices 248 places 2022/23 1.11 per place 268 first choices 241 places 2023/24 1.3 per place 316 first choices 243 places 2024/25 1.19 per place 303 first choices 254 places 2025/26 1.03 per place 273 first choices 266 places 2026/27 0.97 per place 266 first choices 274 places
First preferences per place at Beauchamps High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 266 first preferences for 274 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Beauchamps 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
2015/16 234 239 215 1.02
2016/17 229 218 209 0.95
2017/18 234 239 215 1.02
2018/19 243 242 231 1
2019/20 247 208 203 0.84
2020/21 238 205 197 0.86
2021/22 248 281 231 1.13
2022/23 241 268 234 1.11
2023/24 243 316 236 1.3
2024/25 254 303 245 1.19
2025/26 266 273 248 1.03
2026/27 274 266 250 0.97

Places offered

274

in 2026/27

Named first choice

266

847 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

94%

250 of 266

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 274 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Beauchamps High School published for 2025 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for Beauchamps High School, 2025 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Looked after children and previously looked after children#.
2 Children of teaching and non-teaching staff who have been directly employed by Beauchamps High School for two or more years at the time of application for admission to the school. Children of staff members who are recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage will also receive the same priority.
3 Children with a sibling‡ attending the school.
4 Children whose registered main home address is in the priority admission area and has a postcode starting with SS11.
5 Children whose registered main home address is in the priority admission area and has a postcode starting with SS12.
6 Any remaining places will be allocated by straight line distance* from the child’s registered main home address to the school. In the event of oversubscription within any of the above criteria, straight line distance* will be used as a tie-breaker, with those living nearest to the school by straight line distance* having highest priority. Parents who wish for their child(ren) to attend Beauchamps High School must apply following the arrangements set out in the scheme for the co-ordination of student admissions in Essex, by the specified closing date. […] criterion continues in the source document

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2025 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

Beauchamps High School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

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

1,350

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,241

91.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

109

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

236

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 Beauchamps 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 Beauchamps High School reported 109 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 91.9% 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

Places and pupils on roll at Beauchamps High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,349 places 1,331 on roll 2010/11 1,349 places 1,313 on roll 2011/12 1,322 places 1,289 on roll 2012/13 1,318 places 1,319 on roll 2013/14 1,339 places 1,312 on roll 2014/15 1,339 places 1,306 on roll 2015/16 1,339 places 1,297 on roll 2016/17 1,325 places 1,262 on roll 2017/18 1,334 places 1,303 on roll 2018/19 1,361 places 1,355 on roll 2020/21 1,436 places 1,428 on roll 2021/22 1,453 places 1,414 on roll 2022/23 1,446 places 1,416 on roll 2023/24 1,456 places 1,438 on roll 2024/25 1,586 places 1,463 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
Foundation school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Essex

Postcode SS11 8LY. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 115322).

Other contested secondary schools in Essex

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.