School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Weald of Kent Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 68 families who named Weald of Kent Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: 234 put it first and 166 of them were offered one.

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

68

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

234 first preferences for 300 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Weald of Kent Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Weald of Kent Grammar 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

Weald of Kent Grammar School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 7 of those years. In the other 5 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — 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 Weald of Kent Grammar 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 1.2 per place 209 first choices 174 places 2016/17 1.08 per place 248 first choices 230 places 2017/18 1.02 per place 269 first choices 264 places 2018/19 1.06 per place 314 first choices 296 places 2019/20 1.13 per place 332 first choices 295 places 2020/21 1.13 per place 317 first choices 280 places 2021/22 1.5 per place 449 first choices 300 places 2022/23 0.78 per place 259 first choices 330 places 2023/24 0.84 per place 251 first choices 299 places 2024/25 0.74 per place 223 first choices 300 places 2025/26 0.79 per place 238 first choices 300 places 2026/27 0.78 per place 234 first choices 300 places
First preferences per place at Weald of Kent Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 234 first preferences for 300 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Weald of Kent Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 174 209 134 1.2
2016/17 230 248 157 1.08
2017/18 264 269 181 1.02
2018/19 296 314 231 1.06
2019/20 295 332 235 1.13
2020/21 280 317 211 1.13
2021/22 300 449 209 1.5
2022/23 330 259 195 0.78
2023/24 299 251 190 0.84
2024/25 300 223 182 0.74
2025/26 300 238 197 0.79
2026/27 300 234 166 0.78

Places offered

300

in 2026/27

Named first choice

234

995 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

70.9%

166 of 234

Offers to families outside the council

12%

37 of 300 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Weald of Kent Grammar 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 Weald of Kent Grammar 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
2 Pupil Premium*
3 Current Family Association
4 Health and Special Access Reasons
5 Children of Permanent Members of Staff
6 Average point score of best eight GCSEs Each category will be further ranked by distance from the school (OS Reference TQ59489 45217 as determined by KCC). Details of categories 1-5 can be found on pages 1-2 of this policy. *Students in receipt of Pupil Premium should provide evidence from their current school or local authority as part of their application.
7 A waiting list of qualifying applicants will be maintained in the order of the oversubscription criteria until 31 December. This list will be re-ranked each time a new student is added.
8 For applicants who are seeking a place in the sixth form outside of their normal age group, please see Section 3 of this policy. The school must be notified of this at application.
9 Right to appeal. There is a right of appeal against the refusal of a place once GCSE results are published. This should be made using the link on the school website, found on the Admissions page, titled ‘Appeal Information’. All appeals must be received within the date published on the school website. Appeals will be heard by an Independent Appeal Panel within 30 school days of receipt of the request.

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.

Weald of Kent Grammar 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

1,589

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,450

91.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

139

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

595

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 Weald of Kent Grammar 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 Weald of Kent Grammar School reported 139 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 91.3% 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.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Weald of Kent Grammar School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 1,100 2,200 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,037 places 1,079 on roll 2011/12 1,037 places 1,099 on roll 2012/13 1,050 places 1,126 on roll 2013/14 1,225 places 1,132 on roll 2014/15 1,225 places 1,167 on roll 2015/16 1,225 places 1,179 on roll 2016/17 1,225 places 1,294 on roll 2017/18 1,675 places 1,425 on roll 2018/19 1,675 places 1,552 on roll 2020/21 1,675 places 1,816 on roll 2021/22 1,855 places 1,921 on roll 2022/23 2,000 places 1,963 on roll 2023/24 2,000 places 1,918 on roll 2024/25 2,184 places 1,903 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.

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. Weald of Kent Grammar School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Weald of Kent Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
31 August 2017 Arrangements did not comply ADA3285

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 converter
Admissions policy
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Kent

Postcode TN9 2JP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136455).

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.