School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Roundwood Park School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 51 families who named Roundwood Park School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 187 and 219 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

219 first preferences for 187 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Roundwood Park School

There is no published appeal success rate for Roundwood Park 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

Roundwood Park School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Roundwood Park 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 1.12 per place 219 first choices 195 places 2016/17 1.11 per place 208 first choices 188 places 2017/18 1.07 per place 203 first choices 189 places 2018/19 1.15 per place 220 first choices 191 places 2019/20 1.31 per place 246 first choices 188 places 2020/21 1.18 per place 227 first choices 193 places 2021/22 0.91 per place 172 first choices 190 places 2022/23 1.05 per place 214 first choices 204 places 2023/24 1.04 per place 208 first choices 200 places 2024/25 1.12 per place 217 first choices 193 places 2025/26 1.12 per place 204 first choices 182 places 2026/27 1.17 per place 219 first choices 187 places
First preferences per place at Roundwood Park School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 219 first preferences for 187 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Roundwood Park School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 195 219 165 1.12
2016/17 188 208 175 1.11
2017/18 189 203 181 1.07
2018/19 191 220 171 1.15
2019/20 188 246 165 1.31
2020/21 193 227 174 1.18
2021/22 190 172 169 0.91
2022/23 204 214 177 1.05
2023/24 200 208 181 1.04
2024/25 193 217 175 1.12
2025/26 182 204 169 1.12
2026/27 187 219 168 1.17

Places offered

187

in 2026/27

Named first choice

219

689 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

76.7%

168 of 219

Offers to families outside the council

6%

12 of 187 offers

How close you had to live

Roundwood Park School filled its places in 2026, and 3,396m — 2.11 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the in priority area, nearest school criterion.

Last place offered at

2.11 mi

3,396 metres, 2026

Under criterion

In Priority Area, 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 Roundwood Park 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Roundwood Park School, 2026 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. Previously looked after children are those who were looked after but ceased to be so because of being adopted or became subject to a child arrangements order or a special guardianship order. See notes below for further information.
2 Medical or social needs: 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 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. See notes below for further information.
3 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 (see overleaf for a full explanation of “sibling”). Note: the ‘normal age range’ is the designated range for which the school provides, i.e. Years 7 to 13 in this school. See notes below for further information.
4 Children of staff: The school will admit a child of a member of staff provided that the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made or where the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. To be eligible under this rule, the staff member must be the child's natural parent or otherwise have parental responsibility (as defined under the Children Act 1989) for the child. For the purposes of satisfying these criteria, a member of staff is defined as any permanent member of the staff, working full or part time. […] criterion continues in the source document
5 Children who live in the priority area and for whom it is their nearest Hertfordshire maintained school or academy that is non-faith, co-educational and non-partially selective. Note: Non-partially selective means that the school does not offer any places based on academic ability. For admission allocation purposes Tring School is included as a non-faith school. See notes below for further information.
6 Children who live in the priority area who live nearest to the school. See notes below for further information.
7 Children living outside the priority area on the basis of distance, with those living nearest to the school given priority. See notes below for further information. These rules are applied in the order they are printed above. If more children qualify under a particular rule than there are places available, for rules 2-5 the next rule will be applied to further prioritise children.

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.

Roundwood Park 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

945

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,007

106.6% of capacity

Over its capacity by

62

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

300

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 Roundwood Park 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 Roundwood Park 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 Roundwood Park School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,224 places 1,199 on roll 2012/13 1,230 places 1,201 on roll 2013/14 1,230 places 1,234 on roll 2014/15 1,230 places 1,257 on roll 2015/16 1,260 places 1,247 on roll 2016/17 1,260 places 1,260 on roll 2017/18 1,280 places 1,266 on roll 2018/19 1,280 places 1,298 on roll 2020/21 1,280 places 1,317 on roll 2021/22 1,316 places 1,347 on roll 2022/23 1,316 places 1,352 on roll 2023/24 1,316 places 1,368 on roll 2024/25 1,245 places 1,434 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 AL5 3AE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136973).

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.