School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Sandringham School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 108 families who named Sandringham School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 233 and 337 put it first.

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

1.45

first choices for every place available

337 first preferences for 233 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Sandringham School

There is no published appeal success rate for Sandringham 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

Sandringham 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.

First preferences per place at Sandringham 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 1.37 per place 287 first choices 209 places 2016/17 1.25 per place 263 first choices 210 places 2017/18 1.35 per place 322 first choices 238 places 2018/19 1.19 per place 281 first choices 237 places 2019/20 1.43 per place 338 first choices 237 places 2020/21 1.13 per place 268 first choices 238 places 2021/22 1.28 per place 307 first choices 240 places 2022/23 1.23 per place 288 first choices 234 places 2023/24 1.32 per place 313 first choices 238 places 2024/25 1.42 per place 326 first choices 229 places 2025/26 1.34 per place 311 first choices 232 places 2026/27 1.45 per place 337 first choices 233 places
First preferences per place at Sandringham School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 337 first preferences for 233 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Sandringham School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 209 287 194 1.37
2016/17 210 263 186 1.25
2017/18 238 322 220 1.35
2018/19 237 281 200 1.19
2019/20 237 338 228 1.43
2020/21 238 268 221 1.13
2021/22 240 307 232 1.28
2022/23 234 288 224 1.23
2023/24 238 313 234 1.32
2024/25 229 326 226 1.42
2025/26 232 311 224 1.34
2026/27 233 337 229 1.45

Places offered

233

in 2026/27

Named first choice

337

1,005 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

68%

229 of 337

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 233 offers

How close you had to live

Sandringham School filled its places in 2026, and 1,014m — 0.63 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the distance criterion.

Last place offered at

0.63 mi

1,014 metres, 2026

Under criterion

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 Sandringham 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 Sandringham 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 arrangements1 order or a special guardianship order2.
2 Medical. Children for whom it can be demonstrated that they have a compelling medical reason for attending the school.
3 Sibling. Children with a sibling already at the school at the time of application where there is a reasonable expectation that the sibling will continue to be attending the school at the start of the new academic year.
4 Children of staff.
5 Children who live nearest to the school.

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.

Sandringham 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,208

100.7% of capacity

Over its capacity by

8

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

610

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 Sandringham 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 Sandringham 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Sandringham School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 950 1,900 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,278 places 1,166 on roll 2011/12 1,155 places 1,175 on roll 2012/13 1,235 places 1,236 on roll 2013/14 1,235 places 1,260 on roll 2014/15 1,260 places 1,235 on roll 2015/16 1,450 places 1,282 on roll 2016/17 1,450 places 1,288 on roll 2017/18 1,450 places 1,356 on roll 2018/19 1,480 places 1,474 on roll 2020/21 1,700 places 1,601 on roll 2021/22 1,700 places 1,670 on roll 2022/23 1,802 places 1,708 on roll 2023/24 1,802 places 1,772 on roll 2024/25 1,810 places 1,815 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. Sandringham School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Sandringham School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
12 July 2017 No fault found ADA3320

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 AL4 9NX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136609).

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.