School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Beaumont School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 82 families who named Beaumont School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 225 and 287 put it first.

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

1.28

first choices for every place available

287 first preferences for 225 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Beaumont School

There is no published appeal success rate for Beaumont 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 Hertfordshire 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 Hertfordshire, 21% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 314 of 1,496 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 Hertfordshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Hertfordshire 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

Beaumont 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 Beaumont 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 1.29 per place 233 first choices 180 places 2016/17 1.47 per place 263 first choices 179 places 2017/18 1.35 per place 248 first choices 184 places 2018/19 1.72 per place 355 first choices 206 places 2019/20 1.41 per place 291 first choices 207 places 2020/21 1.48 per place 305 first choices 206 places 2021/22 1.43 per place 296 first choices 207 places 2022/23 1.45 per place 340 first choices 234 places 2023/24 1.53 per place 353 first choices 230 places 2024/25 1.97 per place 384 first choices 195 places 2025/26 1.42 per place 327 first choices 231 places 2026/27 1.28 per place 287 first choices 225 places
First preferences per place at Beaumont School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 287 first preferences for 225 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Beaumont School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 180 233 166 1.29
2016/17 179 263 169 1.47
2017/18 184 248 166 1.35
2018/19 206 355 198 1.72
2019/20 207 291 199 1.41
2020/21 206 305 198 1.48
2021/22 207 296 197 1.43
2022/23 234 340 231 1.45
2023/24 230 353 225 1.53
2024/25 195 384 193 1.97
2025/26 231 327 225 1.42
2026/27 225 287 205 1.28

Places offered

225

in 2026/27

Named first choice

287

1,123 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

71.4%

205 of 287

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 225 offers

How close you had to live

Beaumont School filled its places in 2026, and 1,359m — 0.84 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the in priority area, nearest school criterion.

Last place offered at

0.84 mi

1,359 metres, 2026

Under criterion

In Priority Area, Nearest School

as the council described it

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Hertfordshire Council, allocation statistics for 2026. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Beaumont School published for 2027 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 Beaumont School, 2027 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 Children Looked After and children who were previously Looked After. This includes those who appear (to the admission authority) to have been in state care outside of England, and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted, or became subject to a child arrangements order or a special guardianship order.
2 Children for whom it can be demonstrated that they have a particular medical or social need to go to the school. A panel of HCC officers will make the decision for these claims.
3 Children with a sibling already at the school at the time of application, unless the sibling is in Year 13.
4 Children of staff.
5 Children who live in the priority admission area for whom it is their nearest Hertfordshire maintained school or academy that is non-faith, co-educational and non-partially selective.
6 Children who live in the priority admission area who live nearest to the school. Rule 7 Children living outside the priority admission area on the basis of distance, with those living nearest to the school given priority. If more children qualify under a particular rule than there are places available, a tie-break will be used by applying the next rule to those children. Section 3 – Definitions and Details

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 2027 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.

Beaumont School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,144

95.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

56

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

500

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 Beaumont 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 Beaumont School reported 56 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 95.3% 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Beaumont School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,164 places 1,183 on roll 2013/14 1,164 places 1,190 on roll 2014/15 1,164 places 1,214 on roll 2015/16 1,164 places 1,206 on roll 2016/17 1,164 places 1,217 on roll 2017/18 1,164 places 1,263 on roll 2018/19 1,364 places 1,323 on roll 2020/21 1,520 places 1,469 on roll 2021/22 1,580 places 1,497 on roll 2022/23 1,610 places 1,544 on roll 2023/24 1,600 places 1,596 on roll 2024/25 1,700 places 1,648 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
Hertfordshire

Postcode AL4 0XB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138286).

Other contested secondary schools in Hertfordshire

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.