School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Hitchin Boys' School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 34 families who named Hitchin Boys' School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 203 and 237 put it first.

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

1.17

first choices for every place available

237 first preferences for 203 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Hitchin Boys' School

There is no published appeal success rate for Hitchin Boys' 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

Hitchin Boys' 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 Hitchin Boys' 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 1.28 per place 209 first choices 163 places 2016/17 1.12 per place 182 first choices 162 places 2017/18 1.26 per place 209 first choices 166 places 2018/19 1.06 per place 221 first choices 208 places 2019/20 1.03 per place 215 first choices 208 places 2020/21 1.09 per place 225 first choices 206 places 2021/22 1.05 per place 218 first choices 208 places 2022/23 1.11 per place 232 first choices 209 places 2023/24 1.28 per place 263 first choices 206 places 2024/25 1.18 per place 244 first choices 206 places 2025/26 1.31 per place 263 first choices 201 places 2026/27 1.17 per place 237 first choices 203 places
First preferences per place at Hitchin Boys' School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 237 first preferences for 203 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Hitchin Boys' School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 163 209 157 1.28
2016/17 162 182 152 1.12
2017/18 166 209 162 1.26
2018/19 208 221 201 1.06
2019/20 208 215 195 1.03
2020/21 206 225 205 1.09
2021/22 208 218 197 1.05
2022/23 209 232 209 1.11
2023/24 206 263 205 1.28
2024/25 206 244 202 1.18
2025/26 201 263 200 1.31
2026/27 203 237 203 1.17

Places offered

203

in 2026/27

Named first choice

237

399 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

85.7%

203 of 237

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 203 offers

How close you had to live

Hitchin Boys' School filled its places in 2026, and 7,475m — 4.64 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the in priority area, not nearest school criterion.

Last place offered at

4.64 mi

7,475 metres, 2026

Under criterion

In Priority Area, Not 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.

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

1,056

94.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

64

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

280

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 Hitchin Boys' 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 Hitchin Boys' School reported 64 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 94.3% 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 Hitchin Boys' School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,032 places 1,004 on roll 2013/14 1,032 places 1,032 on roll 2014/15 1,032 places 1,036 on roll 2015/16 1,032 places 1,045 on roll 2016/17 1,032 places 1,054 on roll 2017/18 1,400 places 1,085 on roll 2018/19 1,400 places 1,127 on roll 2020/21 1,400 places 1,221 on roll 2021/22 1,400 places 1,284 on roll 2022/23 1,400 places 1,307 on roll 2023/24 1,400 places 1,318 on roll 2024/25 1,400 places 1,356 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. Hitchin Boys' School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Hitchin Boys' School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
26 September 2023 No fault found ADA4146-8, ADA4152, ADA4165-7, ADA4169-72, ADA4174-5, ADA4185, ADA4187 and ADA4224
4 September 2015 Arrangements did not comply ADA2978

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 SG5 1JB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139154).

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.