School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Mayfield School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 18 families who named Mayfield School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 110 and 114 put it first.

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

1.04

first choices for every place available

114 first preferences for 110 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Mayfield School

There is no published appeal success rate for Mayfield 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 Portsmouth 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 Portsmouth, 12.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 38 of 295 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 Portsmouth.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Portsmouth 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

Mayfield School turned first-choice families away in 4 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 Mayfield 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 1.32 per place 265 first choices 200 places 2016/17 1.2 per place 238 first choices 198 places 2017/18 0.98 per place 194 first choices 197 places 2018/19 0.91 per place 169 first choices 186 places 2019/20 0.86 per place 155 first choices 180 places 2020/21 0.95 per place 135 first choices 142 places 2021/22 0.91 per place 127 first choices 139 places 2022/23 1.35 per place 146 first choices 108 places 2023/24 0.96 per place 115 first choices 120 places 2024/25 0.72 per place 78 first choices 109 places 2025/26 0.57 per place 63 first choices 110 places 2026/27 1.04 per place 114 first choices 110 places
First preferences per place at Mayfield School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 114 first preferences for 110 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Mayfield School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 200 265 194 1.32
2016/17 198 238 190 1.2
2017/18 197 194 194 0.98
2018/19 186 169 169 0.91
2019/20 180 155 155 0.86
2020/21 142 135 135 0.95
2021/22 139 127 127 0.91
2022/23 108 146 107 1.35
2023/24 120 115 108 0.96
2024/25 109 78 78 0.72
2025/26 110 63 63 0.57
2026/27 110 114 96 1.04

Places offered

110

in 2026/27

Named first choice

114

415 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

84.2%

96 of 114

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 110 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 116463.

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

1,540

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,364

88.6% of capacity

Unfilled places

176

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 Mayfield 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 Mayfield School reported 176 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 88.6% 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 Mayfield School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,350 places 1,170 on roll 2010/11 1,350 places 1,114 on roll 2011/12 1,350 places 1,051 on roll 2012/13 1,350 places 996 on roll 2013/14 1,350 places 1,001 on roll 2014/15 1,620 places 1,077 on roll 2015/16 1,620 places 1,153 on roll 2016/17 1,540 places 1,206 on roll 2017/18 1,420 places 1,240 on roll 2018/19 1,420 places 1,281 on roll 2020/21 1,420 places 1,421 on roll 2021/22 1,540 places 1,462 on roll 2022/23 1,420 places 1,477 on roll 2023/24 1,420 places 1,439 on roll 2024/25 1,540 places 1,364 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. Mayfield School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Mayfield School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
27 November 2023 No fault found VAR2372

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
Academy sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Portsmouth

Postcode PO2 0RH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 150362).

Other contested secondary schools in Portsmouth

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.