School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bushey Meads School?

In 2026/27, Bushey Meads School offered 184 places and 85 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.46

first choices for every place available

85 first preferences for 184 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bushey Meads School

There is no published appeal success rate for Bushey Meads 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

Bushey Meads School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 5 of those years. In the other 6 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at Bushey Meads 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 0.92 per place 174 first choices 189 places 2016/17 1.1 per place 215 first choices 196 places 2017/18 0.99 per place 190 first choices 192 places 2018/19 1.22 per place 243 first choices 200 places 2019/20 1.13 per place 221 first choices 196 places 2020/21 0.96 per place 170 first choices 178 places 2021/22 1.02 per place 184 first choices 181 places 2022/23 1.14 per place 230 first choices 201 places 2023/24 0.82 per place 163 first choices 198 places 2024/25 0.6 per place 114 first choices 191 places 2025/26 0.59 per place 112 first choices 189 places 2026/27 0.46 per place 85 first choices 184 places
First preferences per place at Bushey Meads School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 85 first preferences for 184 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bushey Meads School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 189 174 100 0.92
2016/17 196 215 120 1.1
2017/18 192 190 107 0.99
2018/19 200 243 124 1.22
2019/20 196 221 149 1.13
2020/21 178 170 123 0.96
2021/22 181 184 137 1.02
2022/23 201 230 158 1.14
2023/24 198 163 143 0.82
2024/25 191 114 102 0.6
2025/26 189 112 92 0.59
2026/27 184 85 85 0.46

Places offered

184

in 2026/27

Named first choice

85

368 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

85 of 85

Offers to families outside the council

3%

4 of 157 offers

How close you had to live

Bushey Meads School filled its places in 2026, and 6,355m — 3.95 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the distance criterion.

Last place offered at

3.95 mi

6,355 metres, 2026

Under criterion

Distance

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.

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

1,011

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

971

96% of capacity

Unfilled places

40

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

400

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 Bushey Meads 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 Bushey Meads School reported 40 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 96% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Bushey Meads School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,100 places 1,058 on roll 2012/13 1,100 places 1,063 on roll 2013/14 1,100 places 1,031 on roll 2014/15 1,100 places 1,028 on roll 2015/16 1,100 places 1,059 on roll 2016/17 1,100 places 1,120 on roll 2017/18 1,100 places 1,179 on roll 2018/19 1,400 places 1,221 on roll 2020/21 1,400 places 1,242 on roll 2021/22 1,400 places 1,221 on roll 2022/23 1,400 places 1,220 on roll 2023/24 1,400 places 1,209 on roll 2024/25 1,411 places 1,227 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. Bushey Meads School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Bushey Meads School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
10 July 2019 Arrangements did not comply ADA3558

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
Hertfordshire

Postcode WD23 4PA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137872).

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.