School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School?

In 2026/27, Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School offered 79 places and 79 families named it as their first choice.

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

1

first choices for every place available

79 first preferences for 79 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School

There is no published appeal success rate for Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls 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 Hackney 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 Hackney, 8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 25 of 311 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 Hackney.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Hackney 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

Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School turned first-choice families away in 3 of the last 8 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls 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 16/17 17/18 18/19 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1 per place 53 first choices 53 places 2016/17 1 per place 53 first choices 53 places 2017/18 1 per place 60 first choices 60 places 2018/19 1 per place 64 first choices 64 places 2023/24 1.04 per place 81 first choices 78 places 2024/25 1.04 per place 82 first choices 79 places 2025/26 1.05 per place 82 first choices 78 places 2026/27 1 per place 79 first choices 79 places
First preferences per place at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 79 first preferences for 79 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls 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 53 53 53 1
2016/17 53 53 53 1
2017/18 60 60 60 1
2018/19 64 64 64 1
2023/24 78 81 78 1.04
2024/25 79 82 79 1.04
2025/26 78 82 78 1.05
2026/27 79 79 79 1

Places offered

79

in 2026/27

Named first choice

79

80 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

79 of 79

Offers to families outside the council

52%

41 of 79 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

429

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

386

90% of capacity

Unfilled places

43

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

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 Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls 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 Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School reported 43 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 90% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 300 600 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 348 places 243 on roll 2010/11 348 places 260 on roll 2011/12 348 places 291 on roll 2012/13 488 places 306 on roll 2013/14 488 places 318 on roll 2014/15 488 places 332 on roll 2015/16 526 places 327 on roll 2016/17 526 places 303 on roll 2017/18 526 places 307 on roll 2018/19 526 places 314 on roll 2020/21 526 places 336 on roll 2021/22 526 places 353 on roll 2022/23 450 places 358 on roll 2023/24 429 places 375 on roll 2024/25 429 places 386 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. Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School has been the subject of 5 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in 3 of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
13 August 2024 No fault found VAR2439
5 January 2023 Arrangements did not comply REF3904 (for 2023) and REF4089 (for 2022)
30 November 2021 No fault found VAR2188
8 August 2018 Arrangements did not comply ADA3361
8 December 2014 Arrangements did not comply ADA2777

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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Hackney

Postcode N16 6UB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 133599).

Other contested secondary schools in Hackney

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.