School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Sir John Lawes School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 80 families who named Sir John Lawes School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 187 and 259 put it first.

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

1.39

first choices for every place available

259 first preferences for 187 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Sir John Lawes School

There is no published appeal success rate for Sir John Lawes 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

Sir John Lawes School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 10 of those years. In the other 1 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 Sir John Lawes 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 1.21 per place 234 first choices 193 places 2016/17 1.31 per place 252 first choices 192 places 2017/18 1.19 per place 228 first choices 191 places 2018/19 1.28 per place 245 first choices 191 places 2019/20 1.37 per place 263 first choices 192 places 2020/21 0.96 per place 177 first choices 185 places 2021/22 0.89 per place 172 first choices 193 places 2022/23 1.19 per place 234 first choices 197 places 2023/24 1.06 per place 217 first choices 204 places 2024/25 1.2 per place 238 first choices 199 places 2025/26 1.4 per place 256 first choices 183 places 2026/27 1.39 per place 259 first choices 187 places
First preferences per place at Sir John Lawes School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 259 first preferences for 187 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Sir John Lawes School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 193 234 161 1.21
2016/17 192 252 182 1.31
2017/18 191 228 181 1.19
2018/19 191 245 178 1.28
2019/20 192 263 173 1.37
2020/21 185 177 155 0.96
2021/22 193 172 169 0.89
2022/23 197 234 184 1.19
2023/24 204 217 180 1.06
2024/25 199 238 177 1.2
2025/26 183 256 175 1.4
2026/27 187 259 179 1.39

Places offered

187

in 2026/27

Named first choice

259

751 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

69.1%

179 of 259

Offers to families outside the council

11%

21 of 187 offers

How close you had to live

Sir John Lawes School filled its places in 2026, and 1,026m — 0.64 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

0.64 mi

1,026 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.

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

980

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,014

103.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

34

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

350

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 Sir John Lawes 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 Sir John Lawes 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 Sir John Lawes School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,176 places 1,189 on roll 2012/13 1,176 places 1,209 on roll 2013/14 1,200 places 1,221 on roll 2014/15 1,200 places 1,235 on roll 2015/16 1,200 places 1,234 on roll 2016/17 1,200 places 1,240 on roll 2017/18 1,330 places 1,238 on roll 2018/19 1,330 places 1,277 on roll 2020/21 1,330 places 1,334 on roll 2021/22 1,330 places 1,334 on roll 2022/23 1,330 places 1,349 on roll 2023/24 1,330 places 1,341 on roll 2024/25 1,330 places 1,355 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. Sir John Lawes School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Sir John Lawes School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
8 July 2019 Arrangements did not comply ADA3494, ADA3506, ADA3536, ADA3542 and ADA3563

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 AL5 4QP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137270).

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.