School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Hadlow Rural Community School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 35 families who named Hadlow Rural Community School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 77 and 109 put it first.

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

1.42

first choices for every place available

109 first preferences for 77 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Hadlow Rural Community School

There is no published appeal success rate for Hadlow Rural Community 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 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

Hadlow Rural Community School turned first-choice families away in 7 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 Hadlow Rural Community 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 0.8 per place 47 first choices 59 places 2016/17 0.91 per place 58 first choices 64 places 2017/18 1.13 per place 98 first choices 87 places 2018/19 1.88 per place 126 first choices 67 places 2019/20 1.44 per place 104 first choices 72 places 2020/21 1.59 per place 108 first choices 68 places 2021/22 1.22 per place 84 first choices 69 places 2022/23 1.11 per place 105 first choices 95 places 2023/24 0.9 per place 86 first choices 96 places 2024/25 0.76 per place 74 first choices 97 places 2025/26 0.81 per place 72 first choices 89 places 2026/27 1.42 per place 109 first choices 77 places
First preferences per place at Hadlow Rural Community School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 109 first preferences for 77 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Hadlow Rural Community 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 59 47 47 0.8
2016/17 64 58 58 0.91
2017/18 87 98 78 1.13
2018/19 67 126 60 1.88
2019/20 72 104 67 1.44
2020/21 68 108 63 1.59
2021/22 69 84 63 1.22
2022/23 95 105 85 1.11
2023/24 96 86 82 0.9
2024/25 97 74 74 0.76
2025/26 89 72 72 0.81
2026/27 77 109 74 1.42

Places offered

77

in 2026/27

Named first choice

109

302 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

67.9%

74 of 109

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 77 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Hadlow Rural Community School 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 Hadlow Rural Community School, 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 previously Looked After Children.
2 Medical, health, social and special access reasons will be applied in accordance with the school’s legal obligations, in particular those under the Equality Act 2010.
3 Children of staff where 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 the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage
4 Admission of pupils whose siblings currently attend Hadlow Rural Community School and who will continue to do so on the date of admission
5 Admission of students, on the basis of proximity to the school using a straight line measurement. Further, detail on the over-subscription criteria can be found on the Determined Admissions Arrangements document found above.

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.

Hadlow Rural Community School'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

435

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

383

88% of capacity

Unfilled places

52

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 Hadlow Rural Community 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 Hadlow Rural Community School reported 52 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 88% 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 Hadlow Rural Community School from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 250 500 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 330 places 74 on roll 2014/15 330 places 137 on roll 2015/16 330 places 190 on roll 2016/17 375 places 246 on roll 2017/18 375 places 330 on roll 2018/19 375 places 351 on roll 2020/21 375 places 373 on roll 2021/22 375 places 369 on roll 2022/23 400 places 369 on roll 2023/24 425 places 384 on roll 2024/25 435 places 383 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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kent

Postcode TN11 0AU. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139697).

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.