Refused a place at Hitchin Girls' School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 57 families who named Hitchin Girls' School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 206 and 262 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Hertfordshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
262 first preferences for 206 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at Hitchin Girls' School
There is no published appeal success rate for Hitchin Girls' 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.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
Hitchin Girls' 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 165 | 216 | 151 | 1.31 |
| 2016/17 | 165 | 213 | 153 | 1.29 |
| 2017/18 | 165 | 223 | 162 | 1.35 |
| 2018/19 | 210 | 247 | 205 | 1.18 |
| 2019/20 | 208 | 250 | 200 | 1.2 |
| 2020/21 | 211 | 273 | 205 | 1.29 |
| 2021/22 | 207 | 234 | 195 | 1.13 |
| 2022/23 | 207 | 252 | 206 | 1.22 |
| 2023/24 | 205 | 252 | 203 | 1.23 |
| 2024/25 | 209 | 258 | 209 | 1.23 |
| 2025/26 | 204 | 266 | 202 | 1.3 |
| 2026/27 | 206 | 262 | 205 | 1.27 |
Places offered
206
in 2026/27
Named first choice
262
429 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
78.2%
205 of 262
Offers to families outside the council
1%
2 of 206 offers
How close you had to live
Hitchin Girls' School filled its places in 2026, and 1,758m — 1.09 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
1.09 mi
1,758 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.
How places were ranked
These are the oversubscription criteria Hitchin Girls' School published for 2026 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.
| Rank | Criterion, as the school words it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Children looked after and children who were previously looked after, including 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 | Medical or Social: Children for whom it can be demonstrated that they have a particular medical or social need to go to the school. A panel of Hertfordshire County Council officers will determine whether the evidence provided is sufficiently compelling to meet the requirements for this rule. The evidence must relate specifically to the school applied for under Rule 2 and must clearly demonstrate why it is the only school that can meet the child’s needs. |
| 3 | Siblings living in the priority area: Children who live in the priority area, (including for this purpose the parish of Baldock), and who have a sibling at the school at the time of application, excluding sisters who a) first entered the school in the Sixth Form (Year 12) or b) are in Year 13 which is the last year of the normal age range of the school.* * However places allocated to siblings from the parish of Letchworth are subject to the limit mentioned below - see rule 6. |
| 4 | Children of Staff: Children of permanent members of staff who are a) directly employed by Hitchin Girls’ School and b) will have been employed at the school for a minimum of two years at the time the application is made for admission to the school or have been recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage. Children who live in the priority area¹ |
| 5 | Girls for whom it is their nearest Hertfordshire maintained school or academy that is non-faith and non-partially selective and makes provision for children of the relevant gender |
| 6 | Girls for whom it is not their nearest Hertfordshire maintained school or academy that is non-faith and non-partially selective and makes provision for children of the relevant gender. If the school is oversubscribed under this rule places will be offered on the basis of distance, with those living nearest the school prioritised. The number of places allocated under rules 1 to 6 to children in the Parish of Letchworth will not exceed 20. If all applications under Rule 6 have been satisfied and places remain available, they will be allocated to any outstanding applicants from the parish of Letchworth, before Rule 7. Children who live outside the priority area |
| 7 | - Siblings living outside the priority area: Children who live outside the priority area and who have a sibling at the school at the time of application, excluding sisters who a) first entered the school in the Sixth Form (Year 12) or b) are in Year 13 which is the last year of the normal age range of the school. |
| 8 | - Random Any remaining places will be offered to children living outside of the priority area, on a random³ basis. |
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 2026 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.
Hitchin Girls' School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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
1,050
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,045
99.5% of capacity
Unfilled places
5
across Years 7 to 11
Sixth form places
350
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 Girls' 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 Girls' School reported 5 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.5% 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
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 Girls' School has been the subject of 3 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 30 June 2026 | No fault found | ADA4727 |
| 26 September 2023 | No fault found | ADA4149-50, ADA4168, ADA4173, ADA4176-84, ADA4186 and ADA4188-9 |
| 4 September 2015 | Arrangements did not comply | ADA3761 |
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
- Whether this year's cut-off will be the same. The distance above is last year's and it moves with whoever applies — it is not a boundary you can be measured against in advance, and no council publishes next year's — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Academy converter
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Hertfordshire
Postcode SG4 9RS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137288).
Other contested secondary schools in Hertfordshire
- Hockerill Anglo-European College 2.49 first choices per place
- Parmiter's School 2.37 first choices per place
- Watford Grammar School for Boys 1.88 first choices per place
- Dame Alice Owen's School 1.78 first choices per place
- Watford Grammar School for Girls 1.77 first choices per place
- Queens' School 1.68 first choices per place
- The Bishop's Stortford High School 1.61 first choices per place
- The Broxbourne School 1.61 first choices per place
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.