School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Colchester Royal Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 217 families who named Colchester Royal Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 128 and 280 put it first.

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

2.19

first choices for every place available

280 first preferences for 128 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Colchester Royal Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Colchester Royal Grammar 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

Colchester Royal Grammar School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Colchester Royal Grammar School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.8 1.5 2.3 3.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 2.14 per place 248 first choices 116 places 2016/17 1.97 per place 229 first choices 116 places 2017/18 1.76 per place 211 first choices 120 places 2018/19 1.88 per place 225 first choices 120 places 2019/20 1.95 per place 249 first choices 128 places 2020/21 1.91 per place 242 first choices 127 places 2021/22 2.63 per place 326 first choices 124 places 2022/23 1.64 per place 207 first choices 126 places 2023/24 1.92 per place 244 first choices 127 places 2024/25 1.81 per place 226 first choices 125 places 2025/26 2.21 per place 274 first choices 124 places 2026/27 2.19 per place 280 first choices 128 places
First preferences per place at Colchester Royal Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 280 first preferences for 128 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Colchester Royal Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 116 248 108 2.14
2016/17 116 229 110 1.97
2017/18 120 211 114 1.76
2018/19 120 225 99 1.88
2019/20 128 249 95 1.95
2020/21 127 242 89 1.91
2021/22 124 326 91 2.63
2022/23 126 207 92 1.64
2023/24 127 244 89 1.92
2024/25 125 226 74 1.81
2025/26 124 274 58 2.21
2026/27 128 280 63 2.19

Places offered

128

in 2026/27

Named first choice

280

804 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

22.5%

63 of 280

Offers to families outside the council

44%

56 of 128 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 137814.

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

638

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

640

100.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

2

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

330

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 Colchester Royal Grammar 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 Colchester Royal Grammar School 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Colchester Royal Grammar School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 777 places 838 on roll 2012/13 777 places 842 on roll 2013/14 777 places 846 on roll 2014/15 777 places 855 on roll 2015/16 777 places 876 on roll 2016/17 777 places 903 on roll 2017/18 777 places 929 on roll 2018/19 968 places 953 on roll 2020/21 968 places 1,010 on roll 2021/22 968 places 999 on roll 2022/23 968 places 994 on roll 2023/24 968 places 1,018 on roll 2024/25 968 places 1,060 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. Colchester Royal Grammar School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Colchester Royal Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
4 November 2019 No fault found ADA3606

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
Selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Essex

Postcode CO3 3ND. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 149899).

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.