School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 133 families who named Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 166 and 290 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Hampshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.

1.75

first choices for every place available

290 first preferences for 166 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School

There is no published appeal success rate for Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary 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 Hampshire 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 Hampshire, 34.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 310 of 903 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 Hampshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Hampshire 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

Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary 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 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.22 per place 195 first choices 160 places 2016/17 1.1 per place 198 first choices 180 places 2017/18 1.22 per place 218 first choices 178 places 2018/19 1.25 per place 221 first choices 177 places 2019/20 1.3 per place 233 first choices 179 places 2020/21 1.25 per place 216 first choices 173 places 2021/22 1.35 per place 240 first choices 178 places 2022/23 1.31 per place 233 first choices 178 places 2023/24 1.21 per place 215 first choices 177 places 2024/25 1.36 per place 239 first choices 176 places 2025/26 1.47 per place 245 first choices 167 places 2026/27 1.75 per place 290 first choices 166 places
First preferences per place at Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 290 first preferences for 166 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 160 195 158 1.22
2016/17 180 198 172 1.1
2017/18 178 218 171 1.22
2018/19 177 221 167 1.25
2019/20 179 233 171 1.3
2020/21 173 216 168 1.25
2021/22 178 240 163 1.35
2022/23 178 233 171 1.31
2023/24 177 215 170 1.21
2024/25 176 239 172 1.36
2025/26 167 245 164 1.47
2026/27 166 290 157 1.75

Places offered

166

in 2026/27

Named first choice

290

431 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

54.1%

157 of 290

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 166 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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

890

98.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

10

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 Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary 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 Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School reported 10 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 98.9% 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 Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 620 places 653 on roll 2010/11 667 places 667 on roll 2011/12 620 places 701 on roll 2012/13 750 places 743 on roll 2013/14 800 places 772 on roll 2014/15 800 places 807 on roll 2015/16 800 places 826 on roll 2016/17 810 places 839 on roll 2017/18 918 places 834 on roll 2018/19 900 places 861 on roll 2020/21 900 places 891 on roll 2021/22 900 places 879 on roll 2022/23 900 places 890 on roll 2023/24 900 places 885 on roll 2024/25 900 places 890 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. Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Bishop Challoner Catholic Secondary School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
29 July 2011 No fault found ADA/2178

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
Hampshire

Postcode RG22 6SR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 116478).

Other contested secondary schools in Hampshire

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.