School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Westfield Academy?

In 2026/27, Westfield Academy offered 231 places and 118 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.51

first choices for every place available

118 first preferences for 231 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Westfield Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Westfield Academy, 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

Westfield Academy turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 12 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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 Westfield Academy, 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 0.36 per place 49 first choices 135 places 2016/17 0.44 per place 54 first choices 124 places 2017/18 0.16 per place 65 first choices 415 places 2018/19 0.25 per place 81 first choices 330 places 2019/20 0.17 per place 73 first choices 418 places 2020/21 0.32 per place 89 first choices 282 places 2021/22 0.31 per place 105 first choices 340 places 2022/23 0.3 per place 94 first choices 310 places 2023/24 0.38 per place 106 first choices 277 places 2024/25 0.5 per place 129 first choices 258 places 2025/26 0.56 per place 129 first choices 229 places 2026/27 0.51 per place 118 first choices 231 places
First preferences per place at Westfield Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 118 first preferences for 231 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Westfield Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 135 49 49 0.36
2016/17 124 54 54 0.44
2017/18 415 65 65 0.16
2018/19 330 81 81 0.25
2019/20 418 73 73 0.17
2020/21 282 89 89 0.32
2021/22 340 105 105 0.31
2022/23 310 94 94 0.3
2023/24 277 106 106 0.38
2024/25 258 129 129 0.5
2025/26 229 129 115 0.56
2026/27 231 118 118 0.51

Places offered

231

in 2026/27

Named first choice

118

456 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

118 of 118

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 231 offers

How close you had to live

Westfield Academy filled its places in 2026, and 3,697m — 2.30 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under the outside priority area, distance criterion.

Last place offered at

2.30 mi

3,697 metres, 2026

Under criterion

Outside Priority Area, 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 Westfield Academy published for 2025 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.

Oversubscription criteria for Westfield Academy, 2025 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 Rule 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 order2.
2 Rule 2: Medical or Social: Children for whom it can be demonstrated that they have a specific medical or social need to go to the Westfield Academy. A panel of HCC officers will determine whether the evidence provided is sufficiently compelling to meet the requirements for this rule. The evidence must relate specifically to the Westfield Academy and must clearly demonstrate why Westfield Academy is the only school that can meet the child’s needs.
3 Rule 3: Sibling: Children who have a brother or sister still in attendance at Westfield Academy at the time of application, unless the sibling is in the last year of the normal age range of the school.3 This includes siblings living in the same household, step-siblings and adopted siblings but does not apply to cousins. The Academy reserves the right to ask for proof of relationship once offers have been made.
4 Rule 4: Children who live in the priority area for whom Westfield Academy is their nearest Hertfordshire school or Academy that is non-faith, co-educational and non-partially selective.

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 2025 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.

Westfield Academy's determined admission arrangements for 2025 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,158

96.5% of capacity

Unfilled places

42

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 Westfield Academy 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 Westfield Academy reported 42 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 96.5% 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Westfield Academy from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 1,362 places 1,032 on roll 2014/15 1,200 places 948 on roll 2015/16 1,391 places 939 on roll 2016/17 1,391 places 996 on roll 2017/18 1,600 places 961 on roll 2018/19 1,600 places 1,029 on roll 2020/21 1,600 places 1,101 on roll 2021/22 1,600 places 1,200 on roll 2022/23 1,600 places 1,326 on roll 2023/24 1,600 places 1,343 on roll 2024/25 1,600 places 1,313 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
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Hertfordshire

Postcode WD18 6NS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140049).

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.