School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at EKC Sheppey Secondary?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 12 families who named EKC Sheppey Secondary as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 142 and 148 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Kent actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 2 years of official figures.

1.04

first choices for every place available

148 first preferences for 142 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at EKC Sheppey Secondary

There is no published appeal success rate for EKC Sheppey Secondary, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Kent 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 Kent, 27.6% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 1,757 of 6,368 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 Kent.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Kent 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

EKC Sheppey Secondary turned first-choice families away in 1 of the last 2 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

Only 2 years of published figures exist for this school, so there is nothing to plot yet. The figures themselves are below.

View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at EKC Sheppey Secondary, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2025/26 142 121 111 0.85
2026/27 142 148 136 1.04

Places offered

142

in 2026/27

Named first choice

148

327 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

91.9%

136 of 148

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 142 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria EKC Sheppey Secondary published for 2026 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 EKC Sheppey Secondary, 2026 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 Looked after children and all previously looked after children, including those who appear to have been in state care outside of England and or ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted (or subject to child arrangements orders or special guardianship orders).
2 Children with a sibling(s) who are already at the Academy when your child is due to start.
3 Children who attend a Trust Primary School on the Isle of Sheppey (up to a maximum of 60 places)
4 Child of staff employed at the Academy where a) the member of staff has been employed at the school for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, and/or b) the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage. 5.Isle of Sheppey residents – The Academy will give priority to those living on the Isle of Sheppey (as per the ‘Dual address’ definition).
5 Distance – The Academy will give priority to those living nearest to the Academy (as per the ‘Distance’ definition). If the Academy still has an oversubscription, then a further tiebreaker will be used. Distance from the Academy will be used as a tiebreaker whenever two children have the same priority based on any criteria. In the unlikely event that two or more children in all other ways have equal eligibility for the last available place at the school, the names will be issued a number and drawn randomly to decide which child should be given the place. This process will be supervised by someone independent of the school.

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 2026 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.

EKC Sheppey Secondary's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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

750

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

407

54.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

343

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

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 EKC Sheppey Secondary 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 EKC Sheppey Secondary reported 343 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 54.3% 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.

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. EKC Sheppey Secondary has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming EKC Sheppey Secondary. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
11 June 2025 Arrangements did not comply ADA4430

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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kent

Postcode ME12 2BE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 150934).

Other contested secondary schools in Kent

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.