School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Royal Greenwich Trust School?

In 2026/27, Royal Greenwich Trust School offered 144 places and 80 families named it as their first choice.

Below: what an appeal in Greenwich actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 10 years of official figures.

0.56

first choices for every place available

80 first preferences for 144 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Royal Greenwich Trust School

There is no published appeal success rate for Royal Greenwich Trust 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 Greenwich 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 Greenwich, 6.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 39 of 617 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 Greenwich.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Greenwich 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

Royal Greenwich Trust School turned first-choice families away in 2 of the last 10 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 Royal Greenwich Trust School, 2017/18 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 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2017/18 0.36 per place 64 first choices 177 places 2018/19 0.73 per place 106 first choices 145 places 2019/20 0.78 per place 115 first choices 147 places 2020/21 0.63 per place 93 first choices 147 places 2021/22 0.53 per place 80 first choices 150 places 2022/23 0.49 per place 72 first choices 147 places 2023/24 0.7 per place 103 first choices 148 places 2024/25 0.69 per place 118 first choices 172 places 2025/26 0.7 per place 119 first choices 171 places 2026/27 0.56 per place 80 first choices 144 places
First preferences per place at Royal Greenwich Trust School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 80 first preferences for 144 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Royal Greenwich Trust School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2017/18 177 64 64 0.36
2018/19 145 106 83 0.73
2019/20 147 115 107 0.78
2020/21 147 93 93 0.63
2021/22 150 80 80 0.53
2022/23 147 72 72 0.49
2023/24 148 103 103 0.7
2024/25 172 118 110 0.69
2025/26 171 119 106 0.7
2026/27 144 80 80 0.56

Places offered

144

in 2026/27

Named first choice

80

365 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

80 of 80

Offers to families outside the council

4%

6 of 141 offers

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

780

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

767

98.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

13

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

135

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 Royal Greenwich Trust 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 Royal Greenwich Trust School reported 13 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.3% 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, 2016/17 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Royal Greenwich Trust School from 2016/17 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 16/17 17/18 18/19 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2016/17 600 places 315 on roll 2017/18 600 places 510 on roll 2018/19 600 places 565 on roll 2020/21 1,050 places 745 on roll 2021/22 1,050 places 835 on roll 2022/23 1,050 places 830 on roll 2023/24 1,050 places 850 on roll 2024/25 915 places 841 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.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Royal Greenwich Trust School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Royal Greenwich Trust School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
26 June 2017 Arrangements did not comply ADA3267

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

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
Greenwich

Postcode SE7 8LJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 143927).

Other contested secondary schools in Greenwich

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.