School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Langtree School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 48 families who named Langtree School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 109 and 151 put it first.

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

1.39

first choices for every place available

151 first preferences for 109 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Langtree School

There is no published appeal success rate for Langtree 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 Oxfordshire 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 Oxfordshire, 43% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 238 of 553 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 Oxfordshire.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Oxfordshire 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

Langtree School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Langtree 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 1.37 per place 153 first choices 112 places 2016/17 1.31 per place 151 first choices 115 places 2017/18 1.19 per place 139 first choices 117 places 2018/19 1.28 per place 151 first choices 118 places 2019/20 1.2 per place 172 first choices 143 places 2020/21 1.42 per place 165 first choices 116 places 2021/22 1.14 per place 132 first choices 116 places 2022/23 1.37 per place 155 first choices 113 places 2023/24 1.24 per place 146 first choices 118 places 2024/25 1.04 per place 141 first choices 135 places 2025/26 1.46 per place 165 first choices 113 places 2026/27 1.39 per place 151 first choices 109 places
First preferences per place at Langtree School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 151 first preferences for 109 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Langtree School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 112 153 95 1.37
2016/17 115 151 104 1.31
2017/18 117 139 98 1.19
2018/19 118 151 103 1.28
2019/20 143 172 122 1.2
2020/21 116 165 104 1.42
2021/22 116 132 101 1.14
2022/23 113 155 101 1.37
2023/24 118 146 107 1.24
2024/25 135 141 126 1.04
2025/26 113 165 107 1.46
2026/27 109 151 103 1.39

Places offered

109

in 2026/27

Named first choice

151

402 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

68.2%

103 of 151

Offers to families outside the council

6%

6 of 109 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Langtree 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 Langtree 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 Highest priority will be given to looked after children and all previously looked after children who apply for a place at the school.
2 Priority will next be given to children of staff at the school, in either of the following circumstances:
a) The member of staff has been employed at the school for 2 or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the school is made, or
b) The member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage
3 a. Children living in the designated area of the school with a sibling on roll at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry.
b. Children living in the designated area of the school.
4 Children living outside the designated (catchment) area who will have a sibling on roll at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry.
5 Children who attend named feeder schools. Our named feeder schools are Checkendon CE Primary School Goring CE Primary School Nettlebed Primary School South Stoke Primary School Stoke Row CE Primary School Whitchurch Primary School Woodcote Primary School
6 All other children who do not live in the designated (catchment) area and also do not attend a designated feeder schools (listed above) and also do not have a sibling on roll at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry. In the oversubscription categories 3 – 6 above, priority will be given to children who are eligible for Service Pupil Premium and then to children who live closest to the school by the straight-line distance as calculated by Oxfordshire County Council.

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.

Langtree 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

643

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

624

97% of capacity

Unfilled places

19

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

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 Langtree 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 Langtree School reported 19 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 97% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Langtree School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 350 700 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 591 places 558 on roll 2012/13 591 places 550 on roll 2013/14 591 places 565 on roll 2014/15 591 places 579 on roll 2015/16 591 places 593 on roll 2016/17 591 places 605 on roll 2017/18 591 places 618 on roll 2018/19 591 places 592 on roll 2020/21 591 places 620 on roll 2021/22 591 places 625 on roll 2022/23 591 places 624 on roll 2023/24 591 places 619 on roll 2024/25 643 places 624 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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Oxfordshire

Postcode RG8 0RA. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137976).

Other contested secondary schools in Oxfordshire

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.