School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Judd School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 232 families who named The Judd School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 179 and 400 put it first.

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

2.23

first choices for every place available

400 first preferences for 179 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Judd School

There is no published appeal success rate for The Judd 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

The Judd School 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.

First preferences per place at The Judd School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.6 1.3 1.9 2.5 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.43 per place 222 first choices 155 places 2016/17 1.55 per place 239 first choices 154 places 2017/18 1.49 per place 267 first choices 179 places 2018/19 1.71 per place 308 first choices 180 places 2019/20 1.94 per place 345 first choices 178 places 2020/21 1.9 per place 330 first choices 174 places 2021/22 2.28 per place 411 first choices 180 places 2022/23 1.77 per place 319 first choices 180 places 2023/24 1.79 per place 323 first choices 180 places 2024/25 1.8 per place 318 first choices 177 places 2025/26 1.63 per place 290 first choices 178 places 2026/27 2.23 per place 400 first choices 179 places
First preferences per place at The Judd School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 400 first preferences for 179 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Judd School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 155 222 135 1.43
2016/17 154 239 135 1.55
2017/18 179 267 160 1.49
2018/19 180 308 175 1.71
2019/20 178 345 157 1.94
2020/21 174 330 155 1.9
2021/22 180 411 155 2.28
2022/23 180 319 162 1.77
2023/24 180 323 169 1.79
2024/25 177 318 168 1.8
2025/26 178 290 164 1.63
2026/27 179 400 168 2.23

Places offered

179

in 2026/27

Named first choice

400

995 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

42%

168 of 400

Offers to families outside the council

9%

17 of 179 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria The Judd 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 The Judd 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 Child or Previously Looked After Child Any Looked After or Previously Looked-After Children who receive a ‘Grammar Assessment’ in the Kent Test, including those children who appear to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted.
2 Academic Ability This will be measured by ranked aggregate scores on the Kent PESE tests (the highest score being given the highest rank).
3 Distance Where scores are the same, students will be further ranked by distance from home to school (with the nearest given the highest ranking).
4 Random Selection A random selection will be applied should two or more applicants have the same score on the PESE test and the same distance from home to school. Eligible students will be allocated a number and the selection will be determined drawing lots, supervised by an independent person. Inner Area – Pupil Premium Up to 5 places are made available with the following over-subscription criteria:
5 Free School Meals Up to 5 places to students registered in the current academic year for Free School Meals, ranked according to aggregate score on the Kent PESE tests (the highest score being given the highest rank). Applicants in this category will need to fill out a Supplementary Information Form.
6 Pupil Premium Any unallocated places of the 5 available in criteria 1, will be available to students eligible for the Pupil Premium, again ranked according to aggregate score on the Kent PESE tests (the highest score being given the highest rank). Applicants in this category will need to fill out a Supplementary Information Form.
7 Distance Where scores are the same, students will be further ranked by distance from home to school (with the nearest given the highest ranking).
8 Random Selection A random selection will be applied should two or more applicants have the same score on the PESE test and the same distance from home to school. Eligible students will be allocated a number and the selection will be determined drawing lots, supervised by an independent person. Should any places in this subcategory be unused, due to an insufficient number of qualifying applications, then remaining places will be added to the Inner Area – Main allocation group. Oversubscription Criteria for the Outer Area
9 Looked After Child or Previously Looked After Child Any Looked After or Previously Looked-After Children who receive a ‘Grammar Assessment’ in the Kent Test, including those children who appear to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted.
10 Academic Ability This will be measured by ranked aggregate scores on the Kent PESE tests (the highest score being given the highest rank).
11 Distance Where scores are the same students will be further ranked by distance from home to school (with the nearest given the highest ranking).
12 Random Selection A random selection will be applied should two or more applicants have the same score on the PESE test and the same distance from home to school. Eligible students will be allocated a number and the selection will be determined drawing lots, supervised by an independent person. The waiting list will be maintained until 31 January 2027. It will be re-ranked in accordance with the oversubscription criteria each time a student is added or removed. […] criterion continues in the source document
13 Looked After Child or Previously Looked After Child Any Looked After or Previously Looked-After children, including those children who appear to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted.
14 Academic Ability This will be measured by ranked average performance points score in their best 10 qualifications, or of all qualifications if fewer than 10 subjects completed, the highest score being given the highest rank.
15 Distance Where average performance points scores are the same, students will be further ranked by distance from home to school (with the nearest given the highest ranking).
16 Random Selection A random selection will be applied should two or more applicants have the same average performance points score and the same distance from home to school. Pupil Premium Up to 5 places are made available with the following over-subscription criteria:
17 Free School Meals Up to 5 places to

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.

The Judd 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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

957

106.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

57

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

523

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 Judd 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 The Judd School 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Judd School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 940 places 965 on roll 2010/11 943 places 956 on roll 2011/12 934 places 962 on roll 2012/13 946 places 992 on roll 2013/14 1,007 places 1,019 on roll 2014/15 1,071 places 1,036 on roll 2015/16 1,108 places 1,080 on roll 2016/17 1,108 places 1,092 on roll 2017/18 1,108 places 1,150 on roll 2018/19 1,238 places 1,220 on roll 2020/21 1,261 places 1,384 on roll 2021/22 1,261 places 1,428 on roll 2022/23 1,261 places 1,470 on roll 2023/24 1,261 places 1,501 on roll 2024/25 1,423 places 1,498 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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kent

Postcode TN9 2PN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 118843).

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.