School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Perins School?

In 2026/27, Perins School offered 168 places and 144 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.86

first choices for every place available

144 first preferences for 168 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Perins School

There is no published appeal success rate for Perins 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

Perins School turned first-choice families away in 6 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Perins 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 0.93 per place 186 first choices 200 places 2016/17 0.96 per place 224 first choices 234 places 2017/18 0.91 per place 225 first choices 246 places 2018/19 1.26 per place 299 first choices 238 places 2019/20 1.02 per place 244 first choices 240 places 2020/21 1.11 per place 265 first choices 239 places 2021/22 1.16 per place 278 first choices 239 places 2022/23 1.13 per place 268 first choices 237 places 2023/24 0.9 per place 212 first choices 235 places 2024/25 0.89 per place 205 first choices 231 places 2025/26 1.04 per place 236 first choices 228 places 2026/27 0.86 per place 144 first choices 168 places
First preferences per place at Perins School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 144 first preferences for 168 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Perins School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 200 186 185 0.93
2016/17 234 224 224 0.96
2017/18 246 225 225 0.91
2018/19 238 299 232 1.26
2019/20 240 244 229 1.02
2020/21 239 265 228 1.11
2021/22 239 278 223 1.16
2022/23 237 268 228 1.13
2023/24 235 212 204 0.9
2024/25 231 205 205 0.89
2025/26 228 236 215 1.04
2026/27 168 144 144 0.86

Places offered

168

in 2026/27

Named first choice

144

327 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

144 of 144

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 166 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Perins School published for 2025 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 Perins School, 2025 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 or children who were previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangements order, or special guardianship order. 1 ; or children who appear to have been in state care outside England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted. A looked after child is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in section 22(1) of the Children Act 1989). […] criterion continues in the source document
2 Children whose parents are either members of staff who have been employed at Perins for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to Perins is made; or children whose parents are a member of staff recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage.
3 Children living within the catchment area of Perins3 who at the time of application have a sibling at Perins who will still be on roll at the time of the sibling’s admission. ‘Sibling’ refers to brother or sister, half-brother or half-sister, adoptive brother or adoptive sister, step- brother or step-sister, foster-brother or foster-sister and includes children living as siblings in the same family unit.
4 Children living within the catchment area of Perins who live closest to the school, based on a straight line from Perins to the entrance of the property.
5 Children living outside the catchment area of Perins who at the time of application have a sibling at Perins who will still be on roll at the time of the sibling’s admission. ‘Sibling’ refers to brother or sister, half-brother or half-sister, adoptive brother or adoptive sister, step- brother or step-sister, foster-brother or foster-sister and includes children living as siblings in the same family unit.
6 Children living outside the catchment area of Perins who, at the time of application, attend one of the linked primary schools, namely, Sun Hill Junior School, Cheriton Primary School, Ropley Primary School, Preston Candover Primary School or Four Marks Primary School.
7 Children who at the time of application have a sibling on the roll of Sun Hill Junior School who will still be on the roll at the time of admission.
8 Children living outside the catchment area of Perins, who live closest to the school, based on a straight line from Perins to the entrance to the property. 2 ‘Medical need’ does not include common medical conditions supported by mainstream schools such as asthma or allergies. ‘Social need’ does not include a parent’s wish that a child attends the school because of a child’s aptitude or ability or because their friends attend the school or because of routine childminding arrangements. Priority will be given to those children whose evidence establishes that they have a demonstrable and significant need to attend a particular school. […] criterion continues in the source document

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 2025 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.

Perins School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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

1,150

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,159

100.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

9

reported as full or beyond

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 Perins 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 Perins School was at or beyond its stated capacity across Years 7 to 11. A school in that position has a straightforward case that another admission would cause it difficulty, and an appeal here has to succeed on the strength of your child's own circumstances rather than on spare room.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Perins School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,040 places 1,044 on roll 2012/13 1,040 places 1,055 on roll 2013/14 1,040 places 1,047 on roll 2014/15 1,077 places 1,025 on roll 2015/16 1,077 places 1,025 on roll 2016/17 1,077 places 1,077 on roll 2017/18 1,104 places 1,127 on roll 2018/19 1,150 places 1,152 on roll 2020/21 1,150 places 1,192 on roll 2021/22 1,150 places 1,176 on roll 2022/23 1,150 places 1,173 on roll 2023/24 1,150 places 1,166 on roll 2024/25 1,150 places 1,159 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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Hampshire

Postcode SO24 9BS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137128).

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.