School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Simon Balle All-Through School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 23 families who named Simon Balle All-Through School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 124 and 146 put it first.

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

1.18

first choices for every place available

146 first preferences for 124 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Simon Balle All-Through School

There is no published appeal success rate for Simon Balle All-Through 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

Simon Balle All-Through 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 Simon Balle All-Through 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 1.19 per place 203 first choices 170 places 2016/17 1.11 per place 191 first choices 172 places 2017/18 1.15 per place 205 first choices 178 places 2018/19 1.05 per place 187 first choices 178 places 2019/20 1.62 per place 284 first choices 175 places 2020/21 1.46 per place 258 first choices 177 places 2021/22 1.5 per place 260 first choices 173 places 2022/23 1.76 per place 197 first choices 112 places 2023/24 1.46 per place 167 first choices 114 places 2024/25 1.09 per place 140 first choices 128 places 2025/26 1.24 per place 152 first choices 123 places 2026/27 1.18 per place 146 first choices 124 places
First preferences per place at Simon Balle All-Through School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 146 first preferences for 124 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Simon Balle All-Through School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 170 203 169 1.19
2016/17 172 191 153 1.11
2017/18 178 205 165 1.15
2018/19 178 187 166 1.05
2019/20 175 284 170 1.62
2020/21 177 258 177 1.46
2021/22 173 260 171 1.5
2022/23 112 197 110 1.76
2023/24 114 167 114 1.46
2024/25 128 140 124 1.09
2025/26 123 152 123 1.24
2026/27 124 146 123 1.18

Places offered

124

in 2026/27

Named first choice

146

669 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

84.2%

123 of 146

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 124 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Simon Balle All-Through School published for 2028 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 Simon Balle All-Through School, 2028 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 children 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 arrangement order or a special guardianship order. (see explanatory notes) Children who were not looked after immediately before being adopted or made the subject of a child arrangement order or special guardianship order, will not be prioritised under this rule.
2 Children of Staff. (See explanatory notes for full definition)
3 Sibling: Children who have a sibling (living at the same permanent home address) at the school at the time of application unless it is anticipated that the sibling will have left the school before the date of the proposed admission of the applicant. (Siblings must be in Reception to Year 12 and exclude pupils who first joined the school in the 6th form, Years 12 and 13 or those applicants with siblings who successfully joined the school through Rule 6 - Musical Aptitude Test unless living in Hertford/Hertford Heath) (see explanatory notes).
4 Children who live in the priority area for whom it is their nearest* school or academy. (There is a different definition of ‘nearest’ for primary and secondary applications – see

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 2028 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.

Simon Balle All-Through School's determined admission arrangements for 2028 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

1,320

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,348

102.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

28

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

311

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 Simon Balle All-Through 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 Simon Balle All-Through 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Simon Balle All-Through School from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 1,037 places 1,053 on roll 2014/15 1,037 places 1,046 on roll 2015/16 1,470 places 1,141 on roll 2016/17 1,520 places 1,248 on roll 2017/18 1,520 places 1,330 on roll 2018/19 1,520 places 1,412 on roll 2020/21 1,520 places 1,546 on roll 2021/22 1,520 places 1,577 on roll 2022/23 1,520 places 1,595 on roll 2023/24 1,520 places 1,557 on roll 2024/25 1,631 places 1,561 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 SG13 8AJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140294).

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.