School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 54 families who named St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 182 and 187 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

187 first preferences for 182 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford

There is no published appeal success rate for St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford, 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

St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford turned first-choice families away in 7 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 2 of those years. In the other 5 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford, 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 0.91 per place 168 first choices 185 places 2016/17 0.89 per place 168 first choices 188 places 2017/18 0.89 per place 169 first choices 189 places 2018/19 0.77 per place 144 first choices 186 places 2019/20 0.78 per place 146 first choices 188 places 2020/21 0.98 per place 184 first choices 188 places 2021/22 0.76 per place 145 first choices 190 places 2022/23 1.11 per place 210 first choices 190 places 2023/24 0.85 per place 159 first choices 188 places 2024/25 0.96 per place 178 first choices 185 places 2025/26 0.97 per place 176 first choices 182 places 2026/27 1.03 per place 187 first choices 182 places
First preferences per place at St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 187 first preferences for 182 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 185 168 152 0.91
2016/17 188 168 146 0.89
2017/18 189 169 150 0.89
2018/19 186 144 134 0.77
2019/20 188 146 143 0.78
2020/21 188 184 155 0.98
2021/22 190 145 144 0.76
2022/23 190 210 163 1.11
2023/24 188 159 144 0.85
2024/25 185 178 136 0.96
2025/26 182 176 136 0.97
2026/27 182 187 133 1.03

Places offered

182

in 2026/27

Named first choice

187

645 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

71.1%

133 of 187

Offers to families outside the council

1%

2 of 182 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford 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 St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford, 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 Catholic looked after and previously looked after children. (see notes 2&3)
2 Other Catholic children. (see note 3)
3 Other looked after and previously looked after children. (see note 2)
4 Catechumens and members of an Eastern Christian Church. (see notes 4&5)
5 Children of other Christian denominations whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion or Christening certificate. (see note 6)
6 Children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a religious leader. (see note 7)
7 Other children attending Catholic primary schools.
8 Any other children. Within each of the categories listed above, the following provisions will be applied in the following order.
(i) Where evidence is provided at the time of application of an exceptional social, medical or pastoral need of the child which can most appropriately be met at this school, the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made. (see note 10) (ii) The attendance of a brother or sister at the school at the time of enrolment will increase the priority of an application within each category so that the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made after children in (i) above (see note 8).

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.

St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford'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

950

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

951

100.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

1

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

357

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 St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford 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 St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at St John Payne Catholic School, Chelmsford from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,269 places 1,163 on roll 2010/11 1,269 places 1,135 on roll 2011/12 1,269 places 1,137 on roll 2012/13 1,269 places 1,151 on roll 2013/14 1,269 places 1,160 on roll 2014/15 1,269 places 1,164 on roll 2015/16 1,269 places 1,138 on roll 2016/17 1,269 places 1,146 on roll 2017/18 1,269 places 1,124 on roll 2018/19 1,307 places 1,111 on roll 2020/21 1,307 places 1,196 on roll 2021/22 1,307 places 1,197 on roll 2022/23 1,307 places 1,192 on roll 2023/24 1,307 places 1,180 on roll 2024/25 1,307 places 1,205 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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Essex

Postcode CM1 4BS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 115238).

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.