School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Romsey School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 10 families who named The Romsey School as their first choice did not get a place: 219 put it first and 209 of them were offered one.

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

10

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

219 first preferences for 239 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Romsey School

There is no published appeal success rate for The Romsey 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

The Romsey 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 The Romsey 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 1.05 per place 232 first choices 220 places 2016/17 0.91 per place 226 first choices 248 places 2017/18 1.04 per place 233 first choices 223 places 2018/19 1 per place 230 first choices 229 places 2019/20 1.04 per place 238 first choices 228 places 2020/21 1.02 per place 254 first choices 250 places 2021/22 0.95 per place 218 first choices 230 places 2022/23 0.92 per place 195 first choices 212 places 2023/24 0.85 per place 198 first choices 232 places 2024/25 0.72 per place 174 first choices 240 places 2025/26 1.01 per place 245 first choices 242 places 2026/27 0.92 per place 219 first choices 239 places
First preferences per place at The Romsey School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 219 first preferences for 239 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Romsey School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 220 232 210 1.05
2016/17 248 226 226 0.91
2017/18 223 233 214 1.04
2018/19 229 230 217 1
2019/20 228 238 210 1.04
2020/21 250 254 234 1.02
2021/22 230 218 204 0.95
2022/23 212 195 186 0.92
2023/24 232 198 196 0.85
2024/25 240 174 174 0.72
2025/26 242 245 221 1.01
2026/27 239 219 209 0.92

Places offered

239

in 2026/27

Named first choice

219

519 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

95.4%

209 of 219

Offers to families outside the council

43%

103 of 239 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

1,120

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,130

100.9% of capacity

Over its capacity by

10

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 The Romsey 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 The Romsey 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 The Romsey 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 1,120 places 1,117 on roll 2012/13 1,120 places 1,088 on roll 2013/14 1,120 places 1,079 on roll 2014/15 1,120 places 1,086 on roll 2015/16 1,120 places 1,125 on roll 2016/17 1,120 places 1,124 on roll 2017/18 1,120 places 1,155 on roll 2018/19 1,120 places 1,166 on roll 2020/21 1,120 places 1,181 on roll 2021/22 1,120 places 1,167 on roll 2022/23 1,173 places 1,149 on roll 2023/24 1,120 places 1,153 on roll 2024/25 1,120 places 1,130 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. The Romsey School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming The Romsey School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
30 October 2025 No fault found ADA4434

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
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Hampshire

Postcode SO51 8ZB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137239).

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.