School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Kings Langley School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 16 families who named Kings Langley School as their first choice did not get a place: 155 put it first and 139 of them were offered one.

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

16

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

155 first preferences for 180 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Kings Langley School

There is no published appeal success rate for Kings Langley 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

Kings Langley School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 2 of those years. In the other 9 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 Kings Langley 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 0.94 per place 175 first choices 186 places 2016/17 1 per place 185 first choices 185 places 2017/18 0.94 per place 173 first choices 185 places 2018/19 0.92 per place 172 first choices 186 places 2019/20 0.97 per place 181 first choices 186 places 2020/21 0.79 per place 149 first choices 189 places 2021/22 0.82 per place 154 first choices 188 places 2022/23 0.95 per place 199 first choices 209 places 2023/24 1.1 per place 202 first choices 183 places 2024/25 0.99 per place 182 first choices 184 places 2025/26 1.05 per place 192 first choices 183 places 2026/27 0.86 per place 155 first choices 180 places
First preferences per place at Kings Langley School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 155 first preferences for 180 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Kings Langley School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 186 175 149 0.94
2016/17 185 185 154 1
2017/18 185 173 143 0.94
2018/19 186 172 149 0.92
2019/20 186 181 135 0.97
2020/21 189 149 142 0.79
2021/22 188 154 131 0.82
2022/23 209 199 166 0.95
2023/24 183 202 143 1.1
2024/25 184 182 143 0.99
2025/26 183 192 145 1.05
2026/27 180 155 139 0.86

Places offered

180

in 2026/27

Named first choice

155

592 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

89.7%

139 of 155

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 180 offers

How close you had to live

Kings Langley School filled its places in 2026, and 3,579m — 2.22 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the in priority area, distance criterion.

Last place offered at

2.22 mi

3,579 metres, 2026

Under criterion

In Priority Area, 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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Kings Langley 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 Kings Langley 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, 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 order¹ or a special guardianship order².
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 decide the outcome of Rule 2 applications.
3 Children with a parent who is a permanent full-time or part-time member of the school staff (inclusive of teaching and support staff roles).
4 Sibling: Children who have a sibling at the school at the time of application, unless the sibling is in the last year of the normal age-range of the school. Note: the ‘normal age range’ for Kings Langley School means Years 7 to 13.
5 Children who live in the priority area 6b for whom it is their nearest Hertfordshire maintained school or academy that is non-faith, co-educational and non-partially selective school in the priority area. Note: Non-partially selective means that the school does not offer any places based on academic ability.
6 Children who live in the priority area (6a and 6b) who live nearest to the school.
7 Children living outside the priority area on the basis of distance, with those living nearest to the school given priority. These rules are applied in the order they are printed above. If more children qualify under a particular rule than there are places available, a tiebreak will be used by applying the next rule to those children. Where there is a need for a tie-breaker where two different addresses measure the same distance from a school, in the case of a block of flats for example the lower door number will be deemed nearest as logically this will be on the ground floor and therefore closer. If there are two identical addresses of separate applicants, the tie break will be random. […] criterion continues in the source document

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.

Kings Langley 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

930

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

935

100.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

5

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

250

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 Kings Langley 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 Kings Langley 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Kings Langley School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,145 places 1,074 on roll 2013/14 1,143 places 1,075 on roll 2014/15 1,143 places 1,072 on roll 2015/16 1,143 places 1,091 on roll 2016/17 1,143 places 1,076 on roll 2017/18 1,143 places 1,059 on roll 2018/19 1,180 places 1,044 on roll 2020/21 1,180 places 1,058 on roll 2021/22 1,180 places 1,065 on roll 2022/23 1,180 places 1,094 on roll 2023/24 1,180 places 1,078 on roll 2024/25 1,180 places 1,101 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 WD4 9HN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139036).

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.