School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Castle View School?

In 2026/27, Castle View School offered 237 places and 218 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.92

first choices for every place available

218 first preferences for 237 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Castle View School

There is no published appeal success rate for Castle View 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

Castle View School turned first-choice families away in 1 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 Castle View 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 0.96 per place 159 first choices 165 places 2016/17 0.74 per place 106 first choices 144 places 2017/18 0.64 per place 98 first choices 153 places 2018/19 0.68 per place 84 first choices 124 places 2019/20 0.59 per place 114 first choices 192 places 2020/21 0.97 per place 149 first choices 154 places 2021/22 0.95 per place 155 first choices 163 places 2022/23 0.99 per place 214 first choices 216 places 2023/24 0.97 per place 226 first choices 232 places 2024/25 1.02 per place 245 first choices 240 places 2025/26 0.96 per place 199 first choices 208 places 2026/27 0.92 per place 218 first choices 237 places
First preferences per place at Castle View School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 218 first preferences for 237 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Castle View School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 165 159 159 0.96
2016/17 144 106 106 0.74
2017/18 153 98 98 0.64
2018/19 124 84 84 0.68
2019/20 192 114 114 0.59
2020/21 154 149 149 0.97
2021/22 163 155 155 0.95
2022/23 216 214 214 0.99
2023/24 232 226 225 0.97
2024/25 240 245 230 1.02
2025/26 208 199 199 0.96
2026/27 237 218 218 0.92

Places offered

237

in 2026/27

Named first choice

218

317 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

218 of 218

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 237 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 141498.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Castle View School published for 2027 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 Castle View School, 2027 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. A ‘looked after child’ or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after, became subject to an adoption, residence or special guardianship order. A looked after child is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority, (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in section 22(1) of the Children Act 2014), or (c) those children who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and be in state care as a result of being adopted.
2 Children living in the priority admission area for the school who have a sibling currently enrolled at the school at the time of the application. Siblings are defined as children with a brother or sister, (or a stepbrother / sister,) living at the same address at the time the application is submitted.
3 Children of staff working at the school: Any member of school staff who has been working at the school for a minimum of 2 years at the time of application (on a permanent contract), or to fulfil a vacancy in an area in which it is difficult to recruit. Staff must still be working at the school on 1 March (national offer day)
4 Children living in the priority admission area for the school.
5 Remaining Applications. In the event of a ‘tie’ between applications in any criterion, priority will be determined by straight line distance from home to school, those living closest being given the higher priority. Straight line distances are calculated by the LA as described in the Secondary Education in Essex 2026/2027 booklet. Children with a Statement of Special Educational Needs or an Education, Health and Care Plan All children with a Statement of Special Educational Needs or an Education, Health and CarePlan (EHCP) that name the school on the statement / plan are required to be admitted to the school regardless of their place in the priority order. […] 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 2027 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.

Castle View School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,052

87.7% of capacity

Unfilled places

148

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 Castle View 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 Castle View School reported 148 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 87.7% 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, 2014/15 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Castle View School from 2014/15 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2014/15 1,200 places 988 on roll 2015/16 1,200 places 964 on roll 2016/17 1,200 places 889 on roll 2017/18 1,200 places 816 on roll 2018/19 1,200 places 815 on roll 2020/21 1,200 places 877 on roll 2021/22 1,200 places 932 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 969 on roll 2023/24 1,200 places 1,023 on roll 2024/25 1,200 places 1,052 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. Castle View School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Castle View School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
25 September 2018 Arrangements did not comply ADA3478
13 June 2013 No fault found ADA2418

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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Essex

Postcode SS8 7FH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 147031).

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.