School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Wallingford School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 71 families who named Wallingford School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 226 and 290 put it first.

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

1.28

first choices for every place available

290 first preferences for 226 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Wallingford School

There is no published appeal success rate for Wallingford 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

Wallingford School turned first-choice families away in 10 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Wallingford 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 1.16 per place 219 first choices 189 places 2016/17 1.2 per place 226 first choices 189 places 2017/18 1.32 per place 245 first choices 186 places 2018/19 1.17 per place 223 first choices 190 places 2019/20 1.21 per place 257 first choices 212 places 2020/21 1.04 per place 218 first choices 210 places 2021/22 0.95 per place 199 first choices 209 places 2022/23 0.91 per place 216 first choices 237 places 2023/24 1.05 per place 244 first choices 233 places 2024/25 1.1 per place 253 first choices 231 places 2025/26 1.04 per place 243 first choices 234 places 2026/27 1.28 per place 290 first choices 226 places
First preferences per place at Wallingford School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 290 first preferences for 226 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Wallingford School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 189 219 179 1.16
2016/17 189 226 188 1.2
2017/18 186 245 186 1.32
2018/19 190 223 189 1.17
2019/20 212 257 203 1.21
2020/21 210 218 207 1.04
2021/22 209 199 199 0.95
2022/23 237 216 216 0.91
2023/24 233 244 216 1.05
2024/25 231 253 213 1.1
2025/26 234 243 217 1.04
2026/27 226 290 219 1.28

Places offered

226

in 2026/27

Named first choice

290

518 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75.5%

219 of 290

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 226 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Wallingford School published for 2028 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 Wallingford School, 2028 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 Children who are “looked after” (LAC) by a local authority (LA) within the meaning of Section 22(1) of the Children’s Act 1989 at the time of their application, and all “previously looked after children” (PLAC) [see explanation below] including those who appear to this Admission Authority to have been in state care outside England (IAPLAC) and ceased to be in state care having been adopted [see explanation below]. Evidence of the previously looked after status and/or the adoption will be requested.
2 Children of staff of the academy where: the member of staff has been employed by the academy for two or more years at the time at which the application for admission to the academy is made, and/or the member of staff is recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skill shortage.
3 Children who attend one of the designated feeder schools of the academy (listed separately), live in the catchment area and have a sibling on roll at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry.
4 Children who live in the catchment area and have a sibling on roll at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry.
5 Children who attend one of the designated feeder schools of the academy and live in the catchment area.
6 Children who live in the catchment area.
7 Children who attend one of the designated feeder schools of the academy and have a sibling on roll at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry but live outside the catchment area.
8 Children who have a sibling on roll at the time of application who will still be attending at the time of entry but live outside the catchment area.
9 Children who attend one of the designated feeder schools of the academy.
10 All other children who do not live in the catchment area and also do not attend a designated feeder school of the academy and also do not have a sibling who will be attending at the time of entry. In all categories, priority will be given to children who live closest to the academy by the straight line distance measured by Oxford County Council on behalf of the Admission Authority.

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 2028 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.

Wallingford School's determined admission arrangements for 2028 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

1,215

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,150

94.7% of capacity

Unfilled places

65

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

300

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 Wallingford 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 Wallingford School reported 65 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 94.7% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Wallingford School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,211 places 1,104 on roll 2012/13 1,220 places 1,107 on roll 2013/14 1,220 places 1,144 on roll 2014/15 1,220 places 1,156 on roll 2015/16 1,220 places 1,168 on roll 2016/17 1,220 places 1,193 on roll 2017/18 1,211 places 1,232 on roll 2018/19 1,211 places 1,241 on roll 2020/21 1,322 places 1,306 on roll 2021/22 1,322 places 1,313 on roll 2022/23 1,515 places 1,346 on roll 2023/24 1,515 places 1,413 on roll 2024/25 1,515 places 1,434 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 OX10 8HH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137357).

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.