School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Rickmansworth School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 130 families who named Rickmansworth School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 237 and 292 put it first.

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

1.23

first choices for every place available

292 first preferences for 237 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Rickmansworth School

There is no published appeal success rate for Rickmansworth 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

Rickmansworth School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 7 of those years. In the other 5 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 Rickmansworth 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 1.13 per place 221 first choices 196 places 2016/17 1.07 per place 238 first choices 222 places 2017/18 0.95 per place 186 first choices 195 places 2018/19 1.04 per place 230 first choices 222 places 2019/20 0.88 per place 196 first choices 224 places 2020/21 0.86 per place 190 first choices 222 places 2021/22 0.74 per place 199 first choices 270 places 2022/23 0.84 per place 219 first choices 262 places 2023/24 1.06 per place 250 first choices 235 places 2024/25 1.36 per place 322 first choices 236 places 2025/26 1.34 per place 311 first choices 232 places 2026/27 1.23 per place 292 first choices 237 places
First preferences per place at Rickmansworth School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 292 first preferences for 237 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Rickmansworth School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 196 221 129 1.13
2016/17 222 238 155 1.07
2017/18 195 186 119 0.95
2018/19 222 230 149 1.04
2019/20 224 196 143 0.88
2020/21 222 190 129 0.86
2021/22 270 199 151 0.74
2022/23 262 219 153 0.84
2023/24 235 250 151 1.06
2024/25 236 322 161 1.36
2025/26 232 311 157 1.34
2026/27 237 292 162 1.23

Places offered

237

in 2026/27

Named first choice

292

1,506 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

55.5%

162 of 292

Offers to families outside the council

4%

9 of 237 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Rickmansworth 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 Rickmansworth 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 Looked After Children and Previously Looked After Children within England and Children previously looked after from outside England and subsequently adopted 4
2 and 7. Distance 4
3 Children of Staff 7
4 Siblings 7
5 Musical Aptitude 8
6 Academic Ability 8 Children Out Of Year Group 9

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.

Rickmansworth 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

1,260

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,248

99% of capacity

Unfilled places

12

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

315

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 Rickmansworth 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 Rickmansworth School reported 12 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99% 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Rickmansworth School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,215 places 1,258 on roll 2011/12 1,208 places 1,250 on roll 2012/13 1,208 places 1,235 on roll 2013/14 1,208 places 1,214 on roll 2014/15 1,208 places 1,214 on roll 2015/16 1,215 places 1,246 on roll 2016/17 1,215 places 1,257 on roll 2017/18 1,215 places 1,235 on roll 2018/19 1,432 places 1,304 on roll 2020/21 1,575 places 1,386 on roll 2021/22 1,575 places 1,447 on roll 2022/23 1,575 places 1,512 on roll 2023/24 1,575 places 1,530 on roll 2024/25 1,575 places 1,553 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. Rickmansworth School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Rickmansworth School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
1 November 2021 Arrangements did not comply ADA3792

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 WD3 3AQ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136606).

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.