School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Ricards Lodge High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 34 families who named Ricards Lodge High School as their first choice did not get a place: 193 put it first and 159 of them were offered one.

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

34

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

193 first preferences for 266 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Ricards Lodge High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Ricards Lodge High 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 Merton 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 Merton, 18.5% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 25 of 135 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 Merton.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Merton 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

Ricards Lodge High School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. 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 Ricards Lodge High 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 0.8 per place 194 first choices 242 places 2016/17 0.95 per place 224 first choices 237 places 2017/18 0.76 per place 179 first choices 234 places 2018/19 0.96 per place 229 first choices 238 places 2019/20 0.93 per place 241 first choices 260 places 2020/21 0.96 per place 255 first choices 265 places 2021/22 0.87 per place 230 first choices 263 places 2022/23 0.84 per place 223 first choices 264 places 2023/24 0.93 per place 245 first choices 263 places 2024/25 0.94 per place 244 first choices 260 places 2025/26 0.91 per place 232 first choices 254 places 2026/27 0.73 per place 193 first choices 266 places
First preferences per place at Ricards Lodge High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 193 first preferences for 266 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Ricards Lodge High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 242 194 157 0.8
2016/17 237 224 159 0.95
2017/18 234 179 131 0.76
2018/19 238 229 151 0.96
2019/20 260 241 161 0.93
2020/21 265 255 181 0.96
2021/22 263 230 165 0.87
2022/23 264 223 181 0.84
2023/24 263 245 183 0.93
2024/25 260 244 192 0.94
2025/26 254 232 179 0.91
2026/27 266 193 159 0.73

Places offered

266

in 2026/27

Named first choice

193

744 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.4%

159 of 193

Offers to families outside the council

21%

55 of 266 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,169

97.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

31

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

213

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 Ricards Lodge High 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 Ricards Lodge High School reported 31 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 97.4% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Ricards Lodge High School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 750 1,500 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,200 places 1,187 on roll 2010/11 1,220 places 1,221 on roll 2011/12 1,287 places 1,256 on roll 2012/13 1,462 places 1,268 on roll 2013/14 1,462 places 1,286 on roll 2014/15 1,375 places 1,286 on roll 2015/16 1,375 places 1,288 on roll 2016/17 1,375 places 1,287 on roll 2017/18 1,375 places 1,306 on roll 2018/19 1,375 places 1,326 on roll 2020/21 1,375 places 1,317 on roll 2021/22 1,385 places 1,329 on roll 2022/23 1,413 places 1,361 on roll 2023/24 1,413 places 1,407 on roll 2024/25 1,413 places 1,475 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. Ricards Lodge High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Ricards Lodge High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
24 June 2016 No fault found ADA3089

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
Community school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Merton

Postcode SW19 7HB. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 102673).

Other contested secondary schools in Merton

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.