School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Beaulieu Park School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 87 families who named The Beaulieu Park School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 116 and 180 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Essex actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 8 years of official figures.

1.55

first choices for every place available

180 first preferences for 116 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Beaulieu Park School

There is no published appeal success rate for The Beaulieu Park 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

The Beaulieu Park School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 8 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 7 of those years. In the other 1 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 The Beaulieu Park School, 2019/20 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 19/20 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2019/20 1.06 per place 188 first choices 177 places 2020/21 1.08 per place 192 first choices 178 places 2021/22 1.02 per place 182 first choices 179 places 2022/23 1.02 per place 184 first choices 180 places 2023/24 0.84 per place 172 first choices 205 places 2024/25 1.32 per place 234 first choices 177 places 2025/26 1.29 per place 148 first choices 115 places 2026/27 1.55 per place 180 first choices 116 places
First preferences per place at The Beaulieu Park School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 180 first preferences for 116 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Beaulieu Park School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2019/20 177 188 147 1.06
2020/21 178 192 151 1.08
2021/22 179 182 142 1.02
2022/23 180 184 155 1.02
2023/24 205 172 152 0.84
2024/25 177 234 150 1.32
2025/26 115 148 96 1.29
2026/27 116 180 93 1.55

Places offered

116

in 2026/27

Named first choice

180

1,069 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

51.7%

93 of 180

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 116 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria The Beaulieu Park 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 The Beaulieu Park 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 and previously looked after children. A ‘looked after child’ or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangements or special guardianship order will be given first priority in oversubscription criteria ahead of all other applicants in accordance with the School Admissions Code 2021. This also includes 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. […] criterion continues in the source document
2 Students currently attending the school. Where there are more internal applications than places available, applicants will be ranked according to their Average Point Score (APS) based on their GCSE grades.
3 External students where places are still available on that course. Where there are more external applications than places available, applicants will be ranked according to their Average Point Score (APS) based on their GCSE grades.

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.

The Beaulieu Park 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

1,950

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,525

78.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

425

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

90

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 The Beaulieu Park 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 The Beaulieu Park School reported 425 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 78.2% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2018/19 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Beaulieu Park School from 2018/19 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,050 2,100 places on roll 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2018/19 420 places 60 on roll 2020/21 1,620 places 541 on roll 2021/22 1,620 places 810 on roll 2022/23 1,620 places 1,116 on roll 2023/24 1,620 places 1,409 on roll 2024/25 2,040 places 1,616 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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Essex

Postcode CM1 6DT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 145916).

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.