School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Clement Danes School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 102 families who named St Clement Danes School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 231 and 295 put it first.

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

1.28

first choices for every place available

295 first preferences for 231 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Clement Danes School

There is no published appeal success rate for St Clement Danes 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

St Clement Danes 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 St Clement Danes 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 1.3 per place 268 first choices 206 places 2016/17 1.16 per place 271 first choices 233 places 2017/18 1.5 per place 358 first choices 238 places 2018/19 1.47 per place 343 first choices 234 places 2019/20 1.27 per place 306 first choices 241 places 2020/21 1.25 per place 294 first choices 236 places 2021/22 1.35 per place 314 first choices 232 places 2022/23 1.26 per place 289 first choices 230 places 2023/24 1.24 per place 290 first choices 233 places 2024/25 1.29 per place 291 first choices 226 places 2025/26 1.23 per place 285 first choices 232 places 2026/27 1.28 per place 295 first choices 231 places
First preferences per place at St Clement Danes School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 295 first preferences for 231 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Clement Danes School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 206 268 172 1.3
2016/17 233 271 197 1.16
2017/18 238 358 207 1.5
2018/19 234 343 210 1.47
2019/20 241 306 196 1.27
2020/21 236 294 203 1.25
2021/22 232 314 191 1.35
2022/23 230 289 196 1.26
2023/24 233 290 189 1.24
2024/25 226 291 194 1.29
2025/26 232 285 201 1.23
2026/27 231 295 193 1.28

Places offered

231

in 2026/27

Named first choice

295

1,053 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

65.4%

193 of 295

Offers to families outside the council

26%

59 of 231 offers

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

1,190

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,196

100.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

6

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

400

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 St Clement Danes 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 St Clement Danes 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 St Clement Danes School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,360 places 1,354 on roll 2012/13 1,360 places 1,369 on roll 2013/14 1,385 places 1,360 on roll 2014/15 1,348 places 1,372 on roll 2015/16 1,348 places 1,390 on roll 2016/17 1,385 places 1,390 on roll 2017/18 1,385 places 1,409 on roll 2018/19 1,590 places 1,453 on roll 2020/21 1,590 places 1,573 on roll 2021/22 1,590 places 1,587 on roll 2022/23 1,590 places 1,583 on roll 2023/24 1,590 places 1,592 on roll 2024/25 1,590 places 1,588 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. St Clement Danes School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming St Clement Danes School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
1 November 2021 Arrangements did not comply ADA3791
16 July 2018 No fault found ADA3398

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 6EW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136901).

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.