School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Plume School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 1 families who named Plume School as their first choice did not get a place: 274 put it first and 273 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.

1

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

274 first preferences for 288 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Plume School

There is no published appeal success rate for Plume 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

Plume School turned first-choice families away in 4 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 Plume 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 0.8 per place 194 first choices 242 places 2016/17 0.97 per place 271 first choices 278 places 2017/18 0.89 per place 253 first choices 283 places 2018/19 0.89 per place 253 first choices 285 places 2019/20 0.88 per place 256 first choices 290 places 2020/21 0.84 per place 258 first choices 307 places 2021/22 1.08 per place 310 first choices 287 places 2022/23 1 per place 290 first choices 289 places 2023/24 1.09 per place 317 first choices 291 places 2024/25 1.03 per place 313 first choices 305 places 2025/26 0.93 per place 283 first choices 304 places 2026/27 0.95 per place 274 first choices 288 places
First preferences per place at Plume School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 274 first preferences for 288 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Plume School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 242 194 194 0.8
2016/17 278 271 261 0.97
2017/18 283 253 253 0.89
2018/19 285 253 253 0.89
2019/20 290 256 256 0.88
2020/21 307 258 258 0.84
2021/22 287 310 265 1.08
2022/23 289 290 275 1
2023/24 291 317 281 1.09
2024/25 305 313 291 1.03
2025/26 304 283 283 0.93
2026/27 288 274 273 0.95

Places offered

288

in 2026/27

Named first choice

274

562 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

99.6%

273 of 274

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 288 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Plume 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 Plume 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 (LAC)3, previously Looked After Children (PLAC)4 and Children Previously Looked after from outside England (IPLAC)
2 Children residing in the priority admission area as defined by the catchment area outlined on the Essex County Council website, with a sibling attending the academy at the time of the application, with a reasonable expectation that the sibling will still be attending Plume Academy at the start of the new academic year.
3 Children of staff who have been employed for a period of two years or more at the time of application, or those filling a recognised skills shortage area.
4 Children residing in the priority admission area as defined by the catchment area outlined on the Essex County Council website.
5 Children residing outside the priority admission area, as defined by the catchment area outlined on the Essex County Council website, with a sibling attending the academy at the time of the application, with a reasonable expectation that the sibling will still be attending Plume Academy at the start of the new academic year.
6 Children residing outside the priority admission area as defined by the catchment area outlined on the Essex County Council website.

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.

Plume 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

1,358

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,501

110.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

143

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

400

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 Plume 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 Plume 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 Plume School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 950 1,900 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,841 places 1,797 on roll 2012/13 1,841 places 1,753 on roll 2013/14 1,841 places 1,758 on roll 2014/15 1,841 places 1,748 on roll 2015/16 1,841 places 1,681 on roll 2016/17 1,841 places 1,678 on roll 2017/18 1,841 places 1,634 on roll 2018/19 1,841 places 1,672 on roll 2020/21 1,841 places 1,719 on roll 2021/22 1,841 places 1,717 on roll 2022/23 1,841 places 1,681 on roll 2023/24 1,841 places 1,730 on roll 2024/25 1,758 places 1,788 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 CM9 6AB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137790).

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.