School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Passmores Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 19 families who named Passmores Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 229 and 237 put it first.

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

1.03

first choices for every place available

237 first preferences for 229 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Passmores Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Passmores Academy, 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

Passmores Academy turned first-choice families away in 10 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 Passmores Academy, 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 1.22 per place 243 first choices 199 places 2016/17 1.07 per place 247 first choices 230 places 2017/18 1.07 per place 247 first choices 231 places 2018/19 1.03 per place 238 first choices 230 places 2019/20 1.22 per place 277 first choices 227 places 2020/21 0.97 per place 228 first choices 235 places 2021/22 1.02 per place 237 first choices 233 places 2022/23 1.37 per place 318 first choices 232 places 2023/24 0.98 per place 229 first choices 234 places 2024/25 1.34 per place 312 first choices 233 places 2025/26 1.15 per place 259 first choices 225 places 2026/27 1.03 per place 237 first choices 229 places
First preferences per place at Passmores Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 237 first preferences for 229 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Passmores Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 199 243 180 1.22
2016/17 230 247 210 1.07
2017/18 231 247 212 1.07
2018/19 230 238 224 1.03
2019/20 227 277 214 1.22
2020/21 235 228 218 0.97
2021/22 233 237 227 1.02
2022/23 232 318 228 1.37
2023/24 234 229 228 0.98
2024/25 233 312 225 1.34
2025/26 225 259 218 1.15
2026/27 229 237 218 1.03

Places offered

229

in 2026/27

Named first choice

237

587 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

92%

218 of 237

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 229 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Passmores Academy 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 Passmores Academy, 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 Looked After Children and previously Looked After Children.
2 Children with a sibling attending the school at the time of application.
3 Children attending one of the following primary schools (part of the Passmores Co-operative Learning Community) Potter Street Academy Purford Green Primary School The Downs Primary School Pear Tree Mead Primary School
4 Children of a permanent member of staff who has been employed to work at a PCLC Academy for two years or more at the time of application
5 Other children living in the defined geographical area of Harlow.
6 Remaining applications. The published admission number (PAN) is 240. In view of oversubscription within any of the above criteria, priority will be determined by straight line distance from home to school, those living closest being given highest priority. Exceptional medical circumstances (supported by medical evidence) may override the above. All distances are calculated by the Local Authority using a Geographical Information System. In the unlikely event two applicants with identical distance are competing for a single space lots will be drawn. […] 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 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.

Passmores Academy'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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,200

100% of capacity

Unfilled places

0

reported as full or beyond

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 Passmores Academy 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 Passmores Academy 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 Passmores Academy from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,200 places 937 on roll 2012/13 1,200 places 982 on roll 2013/14 1,200 places 1,008 on roll 2014/15 1,200 places 1,020 on roll 2015/16 1,200 places 1,054 on roll 2016/17 1,200 places 1,067 on roll 2017/18 1,200 places 1,089 on roll 2018/19 1,200 places 1,123 on roll 2020/21 1,200 places 1,200 on roll 2021/22 1,200 places 1,199 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 1,201 on roll 2023/24 1,200 places 1,202 on roll 2024/25 1,200 places 1,200 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
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Essex

Postcode CM18 6JH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137445).

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.