School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Maritime Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 31 families who named Maritime Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 172 and 174 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Medway actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 4 years of official figures.

1.01

first choices for every place available

174 first preferences for 172 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Maritime Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Maritime Academy, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Medway 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 Medway, 22.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 299 of 1,307 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 Medway.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Medway 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

Maritime Academy turned first-choice families away in 2 of the last 4 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Maritime Academy, 2023/24 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 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2023/24 0.66 per place 119 first choices 180 places 2024/25 0.78 per place 186 first choices 239 places 2025/26 1.28 per place 225 first choices 176 places 2026/27 1.01 per place 174 first choices 172 places
First preferences per place at Maritime Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 174 first preferences for 172 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Maritime Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2023/24 180 119 119 0.66
2024/25 239 186 186 0.78
2025/26 176 225 155 1.28
2026/27 172 174 143 1.01

Places offered

172

in 2026/27

Named first choice

174

597 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.2%

143 of 174

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 172 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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

582

64.7% of capacity

Unfilled places

318

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

250

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 Maritime Academy 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 Maritime Academy reported 318 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 64.7% 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, 2022/23 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Maritime Academy from 2022/23 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 22/23 23/24 24/25 2022/23 1,150 places 156 on roll 2023/24 1,150 places 330 on roll 2024/25 1,150 places 582 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. Maritime Academy has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Maritime Academy. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
3 October 2024 No fault found ADA4312

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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Medway

Postcode ME2 4YG. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 149075).

Other contested secondary schools in Medway

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.