Refused a place at The Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College?
You are not alone. In 2026/27, 61 families who named The Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 178 and 213 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
213 first preferences for 178 places, 2026/27
Appealing a refusal at The Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College
There is no published appeal success rate for The Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College, 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 Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College 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 | 159 | 199 | 120 | 1.25 |
| 2016/17 | 160 | 256 | 147 | 1.6 |
| 2017/18 | 180 | 217 | 164 | 1.21 |
| 2018/19 | 179 | 222 | 152 | 1.24 |
| 2019/20 | 180 | 229 | 143 | 1.27 |
| 2020/21 | 180 | 181 | 150 | 1.01 |
| 2021/22 | 191 | 217 | 161 | 1.14 |
| 2022/23 | 187 | 194 | 158 | 1.04 |
| 2023/24 | 185 | 202 | 156 | 1.09 |
| 2024/25 | 185 | 190 | 155 | 1.03 |
| 2025/26 | 186 | 231 | 161 | 1.24 |
| 2026/27 | 178 | 213 | 152 | 1.2 |
Places offered
178
in 2026/27
Named first choice
213
516 named it at any preference
First choices offered a place
71.4%
152 of 213
Offers to families outside the council
28%
50 of 178 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
930
2024/25, whole school
Pupils in them
936
100.6% of capacity
Over its capacity by
6
reported as full or beyond
Sixth form places
500
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 Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College 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 Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College 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
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. The Hertfordshire & Essex High School and Science College has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.
| Determined | Outcome | Determination |
|---|---|---|
| 31 July 2018 | No fault found | ADA3307-3425 |
| 1 September 2015 | No fault found | ADA2848 and ADA2934 |
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
- How close you had to live. Cut-off distances are set by whoever runs admissions for the school. Hertfordshire does not publish them, and no council is required to — the regulations ask only for the admission number and the preferences received. Ask the admission authority directly — 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 CM23 5NJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140786).
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
- The Broxbourne School 1.61 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.