Refused a place at The Broxbourne School?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 144 families who named The Broxbourne School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 228 and 366 put it first.
Below: what an appeal in Hertfordshire actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 12 years of official figures.
first choices for every place available
366 first preferences for 228 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at The Broxbourne School
There is no published appeal success rate for The Broxbourne 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.
- Infant class size
- A mistake in how the decision was made
- Distance and catchment
- Siblings
- Faith and religious criteria
- Medical and social need
- Special educational needs without an EHC plan
- A late application
- In-year admissions
- Grammar schools and the 11-plus
- Sixth form places
- Twins and multiple births
How contested this school has been
The Broxbourne 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.
View as a table
| Year | Places | First choices | Offered | Per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015/16 | 215 | 254 | 208 | 1.18 |
| 2016/17 | 216 | 245 | 209 | 1.13 |
| 2017/18 | 211 | 273 | 201 | 1.29 |
| 2018/19 | 215 | 280 | 209 | 1.3 |
| 2019/20 | 214 | 252 | 203 | 1.18 |
| 2020/21 | 211 | 277 | 201 | 1.31 |
| 2021/22 | 216 | 290 | 206 | 1.34 |
| 2022/23 | 236 | 308 | 231 | 1.31 |
| 2023/24 | 237 | 300 | 224 | 1.27 |
| 2024/25 | 234 | 350 | 226 | 1.5 |
| 2025/26 | 232 | 334 | 226 | 1.44 |
| 2026/27 | 228 | 366 | 222 | 1.61 |
Places offered
228
in 2026/27
Named first choice
366
941 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
60.7%
222 of 366
Offers to families outside the council
7%
16 of 228 offers
How close you had to live
The Broxbourne School filled its places in 2026, and 1,996m — 1.24 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
1.24 mi
1,996 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 The Broxbourne 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.
| 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 arrangements order¹ or a special guardianship order (see Note II). |
| 2 | Children for whom it can be demonstrated that they have a particular medical and/or social need which makes Broxbourne School the only school for that child (see note III). |
| 3 | Children of staff at the school where the member of staff has been employed under a contract of employment with the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made or the member of staff is recruited under a contract of employment to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. |
| 4 | Children who have an older brother or sister (a sibling) at the school living at the same address at the time of application, unless it is anticipated that the sibling will have left the school before the date of proposed admission of the applicant (see note IV) |
| 5 | Home to school distance. The ‘Tie-breaker’. After places have been allocated using criteria 1, 2, 3 and 4 home to school distance is used as the ‘tie-breaker’ to allocate any remaining places within the 90% of places allocated to criteria 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Home to school distance is used as the ‘tie-breaker’ because it is a clear, objective and fair criterion. In those cases where there is a shared parental responsibility for a child, the child’s ‘home’ is the address at which the child stays overnight for the greater part of the school week, i.e. Sunday night to Thursday night inclusive. […] criterion continues in the source document |
| 6 | The remaining 10% of places will be allocated for children who show an aptitude for languages on the basis of an assessment of aptitude carried out by the school (see note I). Priority will be given to those with the highest score in this test. In the event of a tie-break being required under this criterion, places will be allocated using criterion 5 (home-school distance using the home-school measurement system used by Hertfordshire County Council as outlined in the County’s admission arrangements and application literature – see note V). […] criterion continues in the source document |
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.
The Broxbourne 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
1,132
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
1,147
101.3% of capacity
Over its capacity by
15
reported as full or beyond
Sixth form places
245
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 The Broxbourne 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 The Broxbourne 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
Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.
What these figures do not tell you
- Whether this year's cut-off will be the same. The distance above is last year's and it moves with whoever applies — it is not a boundary you can be measured against in advance, and no council publishes next year's — how distance is measured, and when it is arguable.
- How this school decides between applicants. Sibling rules, catchment, faith criteria and tie-breaks are in the school's own admission arrangements. What matters for an appeal is whether they were applied to you correctly — siblings, faith criteria and process mistakes.
- Whether an appeal here succeeds. Appeal outcomes are published by council only. A school being heavily oversubscribed means more families appeal, not that their appeals do better.
About the school
- Type
- Academy converter
- Admissions policy
- Non-selective
- Religious character
- No religious character
- Entry point
- Year 7
- Council
- Hertfordshire
Postcode EN10 7FU. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136396).
Other contested secondary schools in Hertfordshire
- Hockerill Anglo-European College 2.49 first choices per place
- Parmiter's School 2.37 first choices per place
- Watford Grammar School for Boys 1.88 first choices per place
- Dame Alice Owen's School 1.78 first choices per place
- Watford Grammar School for Girls 1.77 first choices per place
- Queens' School 1.68 first choices per place
- The Bishop's Stortford High School 1.61 first choices per place
- Sandringham School 1.45 first choices per place
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.