School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Tring School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 44 families who named Tring School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 225 and 264 put it first.

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

1.17

first choices for every place available

264 first preferences for 225 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Tring School

There is no published appeal success rate for Tring 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

Tring School turned first-choice families away in 8 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Tring 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 1.22 per place 283 first choices 232 places 2016/17 1 per place 237 first choices 238 places 2017/18 1.08 per place 256 first choices 237 places 2018/19 1.1 per place 262 first choices 239 places 2019/20 1 per place 236 first choices 235 places 2020/21 1.17 per place 277 first choices 236 places 2021/22 0.95 per place 226 first choices 237 places 2022/23 0.97 per place 229 first choices 235 places 2023/24 1 per place 233 first choices 233 places 2024/25 1.19 per place 276 first choices 231 places 2025/26 1.26 per place 280 first choices 223 places 2026/27 1.17 per place 264 first choices 225 places
First preferences per place at Tring School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 264 first preferences for 225 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Tring School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 232 283 222 1.22
2016/17 238 237 223 1
2017/18 237 256 224 1.08
2018/19 239 262 220 1.1
2019/20 235 236 215 1
2020/21 236 277 224 1.17
2021/22 237 226 214 0.95
2022/23 235 229 223 0.97
2023/24 233 233 225 1
2024/25 231 276 220 1.19
2025/26 223 280 218 1.26
2026/27 225 264 220 1.17

Places offered

225

in 2026/27

Named first choice

264

501 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

83.3%

220 of 264

Offers to families outside the council

12%

28 of 225 offers

How close you had to live

Tring School filled its places in 2026, and 7,804m — 4.85 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the local parishes criterion.

Last place offered at

4.85 mi

7,804 metres, 2026

Under criterion

Local Parishes

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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,199

99.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

1

across Years 7 to 11

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 Tring 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 Tring School reported 1 unfilled place across Years 7 to 11, at 99.9% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Tring School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 1,500 places 1,504 on roll 2013/14 1,500 places 1,480 on roll 2014/15 1,500 places 1,465 on roll 2015/16 1,500 places 1,473 on roll 2016/17 1,500 places 1,522 on roll 2017/18 1,500 places 1,493 on roll 2018/19 1,500 places 1,523 on roll 2020/21 1,500 places 1,540 on roll 2021/22 1,500 places 1,546 on roll 2022/23 1,500 places 1,535 on roll 2023/24 1,500 places 1,558 on roll 2024/25 1,600 places 1,578 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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Hertfordshire

Postcode HP23 5JD. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138352).

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.