School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Sittingbourne School?

In 2026/27, The Sittingbourne School offered 275 places and 187 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.68

first choices for every place available

187 first preferences for 275 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Sittingbourne School

There is no published appeal success rate for The Sittingbourne 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 Sittingbourne School turned first-choice families away in 5 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 The Sittingbourne 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 0.68 per place 134 first choices 197 places 2016/17 0.69 per place 155 first choices 225 places 2017/18 0.69 per place 177 first choices 258 places 2018/19 0.65 per place 172 first choices 266 places 2019/20 0.59 per place 151 first choices 257 places 2020/21 0.74 per place 185 first choices 249 places 2021/22 0.5 per place 143 first choices 285 places 2022/23 0.7 per place 194 first choices 276 places 2023/24 0.78 per place 210 first choices 270 places 2024/25 0.79 per place 202 first choices 257 places 2025/26 0.76 per place 202 first choices 265 places 2026/27 0.68 per place 187 first choices 275 places
First preferences per place at The Sittingbourne School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 187 first preferences for 275 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Sittingbourne School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 197 134 117 0.68
2016/17 225 155 138 0.69
2017/18 258 177 175 0.69
2018/19 266 172 157 0.65
2019/20 257 151 141 0.59
2020/21 249 185 164 0.74
2021/22 285 143 139 0.5
2022/23 276 194 188 0.7
2023/24 270 210 169 0.78
2024/25 257 202 170 0.79
2025/26 265 202 197 0.76
2026/27 275 187 187 0.68

Places offered

275

in 2026/27

Named first choice

187

808 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

187 of 187

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 242 offers

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

1,350

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,409

104.4% of capacity

Over its capacity by

59

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

300

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 Sittingbourne 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 Sittingbourne 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Sittingbourne School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,285 places 1,315 on roll 2012/13 1,310 places 1,296 on roll 2013/14 1,310 places 1,287 on roll 2014/15 1,310 places 1,171 on roll 2015/16 1,310 places 1,188 on roll 2016/17 1,460 places 1,203 on roll 2017/18 1,460 places 1,272 on roll 2018/19 1,460 places 1,349 on roll 2020/21 1,650 places 1,490 on roll 2021/22 1,650 places 1,550 on roll 2022/23 1,650 places 1,580 on roll 2023/24 1,650 places 1,605 on roll 2024/25 1,650 places 1,568 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kent

Postcode ME10 4NL. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137687).

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.