School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive School?

In 2026/27, St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive School offered 174 places and 102 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.59

first choices for every place available

102 first preferences for 174 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive School

There is no published appeal success rate for St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive 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 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

St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive School turned first-choice families away in 1 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 St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive 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 0.46 per place 84 first choices 184 places 2016/17 0.53 per place 83 first choices 158 places 2017/18 0.44 per place 67 first choices 154 places 2018/19 0.37 per place 56 first choices 152 places 2019/20 0.26 per place 46 first choices 177 places 2020/21 0.35 per place 65 first choices 185 places 2021/22 0.35 per place 63 first choices 180 places 2022/23 0.43 per place 78 first choices 180 places 2023/24 0.54 per place 113 first choices 210 places 2024/25 0.76 per place 135 first choices 178 places 2025/26 0.66 per place 119 first choices 179 places 2026/27 0.59 per place 102 first choices 174 places
First preferences per place at St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 102 first preferences for 174 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 184 84 84 0.46
2016/17 158 83 83 0.53
2017/18 154 67 67 0.44
2018/19 152 56 56 0.37
2019/20 177 46 46 0.26
2020/21 185 65 65 0.35
2021/22 180 63 63 0.35
2022/23 180 78 78 0.43
2023/24 210 113 113 0.54
2024/25 178 135 115 0.76
2025/26 179 119 113 0.66
2026/27 174 102 102 0.59

Places offered

174

in 2026/27

Named first choice

102

418 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

102 of 102

Offers to families outside the council

2%

3 of 167 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

919

102.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

19

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

263

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 St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive 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 St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive 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 St John Fisher Catholic Comprehensive School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,185 places 1,077 on roll 2010/11 1,185 places 989 on roll 2011/12 1,163 places 952 on roll 2012/13 1,163 places 892 on roll 2013/14 1,163 places 848 on roll 2014/15 1,163 places 845 on roll 2015/16 1,163 places 824 on roll 2016/17 1,163 places 817 on roll 2017/18 1,163 places 818 on roll 2018/19 1,163 places 816 on roll 2020/21 1,163 places 882 on roll 2021/22 1,163 places 949 on roll 2022/23 1,163 places 1,022 on roll 2023/24 1,163 places 1,094 on roll 2024/25 1,163 places 1,097 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
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Medway

Postcode ME1 2FA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 118908).

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.