School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Davenant Foundation School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 39 families who named Davenant Foundation School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 185 and 212 put it first.

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

1.15

first choices for every place available

212 first preferences for 185 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Davenant Foundation School

There is no published appeal success rate for Davenant Foundation 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

Davenant Foundation 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 Davenant Foundation 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 1.62 per place 259 first choices 160 places 2016/17 1.39 per place 219 first choices 157 places 2017/18 1.22 per place 198 first choices 162 places 2018/19 1.5 per place 253 first choices 169 places 2019/20 1.5 per place 262 first choices 175 places 2020/21 1.44 per place 252 first choices 175 places 2021/22 1.39 per place 236 first choices 170 places 2022/23 1.21 per place 209 first choices 173 places 2023/24 1.24 per place 217 first choices 175 places 2024/25 1.16 per place 206 first choices 178 places 2025/26 1.03 per place 183 first choices 177 places 2026/27 1.15 per place 212 first choices 185 places
First preferences per place at Davenant Foundation School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 212 first preferences for 185 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Davenant Foundation School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 160 259 154 1.62
2016/17 157 219 147 1.39
2017/18 162 198 150 1.22
2018/19 169 253 161 1.5
2019/20 175 262 166 1.5
2020/21 175 252 161 1.44
2021/22 170 236 158 1.39
2022/23 173 209 163 1.21
2023/24 175 217 169 1.24
2024/25 178 206 163 1.16
2025/26 177 183 166 1.03
2026/27 185 212 173 1.15

Places offered

185

in 2026/27

Named first choice

212

532 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

81.6%

173 of 212

Offers to families outside the council

31%

58 of 185 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Davenant Foundation School published for 2026 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 Davenant Foundation School, 2026 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 Children who are looked after, or children who were previously looked after, including those children who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted. Previously looked after children are those children who were looked after but ceased to be so because they became subject to an adoption, child arrangements order or special guardianship order.
2 Children of permanent staff, both teachers and support staff employed by the School. Priority will be given to children of staff employed by Davenant in either or both of the following circumstances: where the member of staff has been employed by the School for two years or more at the time at which the application to school is made, and/or the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage. Note: for the purposes of this policy a ‘child’ is defined as a biological or legally adopted child of the staff member making the application.
3 Children of parents committed to the Christian faith, determined by attendance at a place of mainstream Christian worship by at least one parent or legal guardian. Regular worship means attending at least once a fortnight and for at least the past five years at the closing date for applications. A Christian Church is a recognised Anglican Church or another Christian denomination which is a member of the Churches Together in Britain & Ireland, the Evangelical Alliance or Affinity. Church affiliation should be current at the time of application. Clergy referees will be asked to confirm, on the Clergy Reference form which is sent to them by the school, that the place of worship satisfies this

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 2026 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.

Davenant Foundation School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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

850

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

909

106.9% of capacity

Over its capacity by

59

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

320

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 Davenant Foundation 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 Davenant Foundation 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Davenant Foundation School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,122 places 1,165 on roll 2011/12 1,170 places 1,167 on roll 2012/13 1,170 places 1,158 on roll 2013/14 1,170 places 1,165 on roll 2014/15 1,170 places 1,195 on roll 2015/16 1,170 places 1,170 on roll 2016/17 1,170 places 1,161 on roll 2017/18 1,170 places 1,173 on roll 2018/19 1,170 places 1,197 on roll 2020/21 1,170 places 1,256 on roll 2021/22 1,170 places 1,221 on roll 2022/23 1,170 places 1,233 on roll 2023/24 1,170 places 1,253 on roll 2024/25 1,170 places 1,233 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
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Essex

Postcode IG10 2LD. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136625).

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.