School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 38 families who named Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 170 and 194 put it first.

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

1.14

first choices for every place available

194 first preferences for 170 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School

There is no published appeal success rate for Nicholas Breakspear Catholic 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

Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School turned first-choice families away in 7 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 5 of those years. In the other 2 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 Nicholas Breakspear Catholic 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 0.47 per place 52 first choices 110 places 2016/17 0.58 per place 63 first choices 108 places 2017/18 0.39 per place 80 first choices 205 places 2018/19 0.52 per place 110 first choices 210 places 2019/20 0.88 per place 154 first choices 176 places 2020/21 0.96 per place 168 first choices 175 places 2021/22 0.84 per place 146 first choices 174 places 2022/23 1.02 per place 181 first choices 177 places 2023/24 1.21 per place 209 first choices 173 places 2024/25 1.15 per place 193 first choices 168 places 2025/26 1.36 per place 234 first choices 172 places 2026/27 1.14 per place 194 first choices 170 places
First preferences per place at Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 194 first preferences for 170 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 110 52 52 0.47
2016/17 108 63 63 0.58
2017/18 205 80 80 0.39
2018/19 210 110 110 0.52
2019/20 176 154 131 0.88
2020/21 175 168 137 0.96
2021/22 174 146 138 0.84
2022/23 177 181 149 1.02
2023/24 173 209 155 1.21
2024/25 168 193 149 1.15
2025/26 172 234 154 1.36
2026/27 170 194 156 1.14

Places offered

170

in 2026/27

Named first choice

194

623 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

80.4%

156 of 194

Offers to families outside the council

24%

41 of 170 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School published for 2025 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 Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School, 2025 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 Catholic children looked after and Catholic children who were previously looked after. (see guidance notes 2 & 3)
2 Baptised Catholic children with a Certificate of Catholic Practice. (see notes 3 & 4)
3 Baptised Catholic children. (see guidance note 4)
4 Other looked after and previously looked after children. (see guidance notes 2)
5 Catechumens and members of an Eastern Christian Church. (see guidance notes 5 & 6)
6 Children of other Christian denominations whose membership is evidenced by a minister of religion. (see guidance note 7)
7 Children of other faiths whose membership is evidenced by a religious leader. (see guidance note 8)
8 Any other children Within each of the categories listed above, the following provisions will be applied in the following order.
I. Where evidence is provided at the time of application of an exceptional social, medical or pastoral need of the child which can most appropriately be met at this school, the application will be placed at the top of the category in which the application is made. (see guidance note 11) II. To children of any member of staff who have been employed at the school for two or more years at the time of application and will continue to be employed at the school at the point of application or the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. III. […] criterion continues in the source document
(i) above (see guidance note 9). IV. Priority will be given to children living closest to the school determined by the shortest distance. Hertfordshire County Council’s ‘straight line’ distance measurement system is used for all home to school distance measurements. Distances are measured using a computerised mapping system to two decimal places on the basis of a straight-line measurement between the front door of the child’s home address (including the community entrance to flats) and the main entrance of the school. The measurement is taken from the AddressBase Premium address point of your child’s house to the address point of the school. […] 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 2025 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.

Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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

852

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

910

106.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

58

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

200

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 Nicholas Breakspear Catholic 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 Nicholas Breakspear Catholic 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,043 places 901 on roll 2012/13 1,043 places 816 on roll 2013/14 1,043 places 678 on roll 2014/15 1,043 places 618 on roll 2015/16 1,043 places 569 on roll 2016/17 1,043 places 560 on roll 2017/18 1,056 places 599 on roll 2018/19 1,056 places 657 on roll 2020/21 1,056 places 891 on roll 2021/22 1,056 places 969 on roll 2022/23 1,056 places 1,036 on roll 2023/24 1,056 places 1,068 on roll 2024/25 1,052 places 1,099 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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Hertfordshire

Postcode AL4 0TT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137938).

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.