School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Henley Bank High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 5 families who named Henley Bank High School as their first choice did not get a place: 148 put it first and 143 of them were offered one.

Below: what an appeal in Gloucestershire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 9 years of official figures.

5

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

148 first preferences for 185 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Henley Bank High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Henley Bank High 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 Gloucestershire 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 Gloucestershire, 26.5% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 424 of 1,598 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 Gloucestershire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Gloucestershire 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

Henley Bank High School turned first-choice families away in 3 of the last 9 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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 Henley Bank High School, 2018/19 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 18/19 20/21 22/23 24/25 26/27 2018/19 0.48 per place 42 first choices 87 places 2019/20 0.49 per place 82 first choices 168 places 2020/21 0.55 per place 93 first choices 169 places 2021/22 0.78 per place 128 first choices 165 places 2022/23 0.92 per place 157 first choices 170 places 2023/24 0.98 per place 158 first choices 162 places 2024/25 0.99 per place 161 first choices 163 places 2025/26 0.97 per place 158 first choices 163 places 2026/27 0.8 per place 148 first choices 185 places
First preferences per place at Henley Bank High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 148 first preferences for 185 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Henley Bank High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2018/19 87 42 42 0.48
2019/20 168 82 82 0.49
2020/21 169 93 92 0.55
2021/22 165 128 116 0.78
2022/23 170 157 144 0.92
2023/24 162 158 134 0.98
2024/25 163 161 135 0.99
2025/26 163 158 133 0.97
2026/27 185 148 143 0.8

Places offered

185

in 2026/27

Named first choice

148

511 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

96.6%

143 of 148

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 185 offers

How close you had to live

Henley Bank High School filled its places in 2025, and 2,929m — 1.82 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the distance criterion.

Last place offered at

1.82 mi

2,929 metres, 2025

Under criterion

Distance

as the council described it

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Gloucestershire Council, allocation statistics for 2025. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

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

860

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

822

95.6% of capacity

Unfilled places

38

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

200

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 Henley Bank High 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 Henley Bank High School reported 38 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 95.6% 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, 2017/18 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Henley Bank High School from 2017/18 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 17/18 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2017/18 850 places 429 on roll 2018/19 850 places 420 on roll 2020/21 960 places 537 on roll 2021/22 850 places 643 on roll 2022/23 850 places 736 on roll 2023/24 850 places 817 on roll 2024/25 1,060 places 865 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Gloucestershire

Postcode GL3 4QF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 145480).

Other contested secondary schools in Gloucestershire

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.