School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Kendrick School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 232 families who named Kendrick School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 127 and 351 put it first.

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

2.76

first choices for every place available

351 first preferences for 127 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Kendrick School

There is no published appeal success rate for Kendrick 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 Reading 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 Reading, 7.8% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 14 of 180 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 Reading.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Reading 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

Kendrick 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 Kendrick School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 1.3 2.5 3.8 5.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 2.14 per place 205 first choices 96 places 2016/17 1.82 per place 175 first choices 96 places 2017/18 2.06 per place 196 first choices 95 places 2018/19 2.07 per place 197 first choices 95 places 2019/20 2.59 per place 246 first choices 95 places 2020/21 2.23 per place 285 first choices 128 places 2021/22 4.56 per place 579 first choices 127 places 2022/23 2.46 per place 310 first choices 126 places 2023/24 3.09 per place 396 first choices 128 places 2024/25 2.92 per place 374 first choices 128 places 2025/26 3.02 per place 384 first choices 127 places 2026/27 2.76 per place 351 first choices 127 places
First preferences per place at Kendrick School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 351 first preferences for 127 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Kendrick 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 96 205 94 2.14
2016/17 96 175 94 1.82
2017/18 95 196 95 2.06
2018/19 95 197 92 2.07
2019/20 95 246 93 2.59
2020/21 128 285 128 2.23
2021/22 127 579 124 4.56
2022/23 126 310 125 2.46
2023/24 128 396 124 3.09
2024/25 128 374 125 2.92
2025/26 127 384 123 3.02
2026/27 127 351 119 2.76

Places offered

127

in 2026/27

Named first choice

351

467 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

33.9%

119 of 351

Offers to families outside the council

46%

59 of 127 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

640

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

641

100.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

1

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

280

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 Kendrick 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 Kendrick 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Kendrick School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 790 places 708 on roll 2011/12 790 places 704 on roll 2012/13 790 places 707 on roll 2013/14 790 places 718 on roll 2014/15 790 places 720 on roll 2015/16 790 places 736 on roll 2016/17 790 places 740 on roll 2017/18 790 places 742 on roll 2018/19 760 places 738 on roll 2020/21 920 places 802 on roll 2021/22 920 places 830 on roll 2022/23 920 places 864 on roll 2023/24 920 places 900 on roll 2024/25 920 places 933 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. Kendrick School has been the subject of 3 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Kendrick School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
11 October 2021 Arrangements did not comply ADA3773
26 September 2019 No fault found ADA3594
11 September 2015 No fault found ADA2952

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 converter
Admissions policy
Selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Reading

Postcode RG1 5BN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136448).

Other contested secondary schools in Reading

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.