School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Herschel Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 78 families who named Herschel Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: 119 put it first and 41 of them were offered one.

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

78

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

119 first preferences for 149 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Herschel Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Herschel Grammar 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 Slough 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 Slough, 6.5% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 88 of 1,349 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 Slough.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Slough 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

Herschel Grammar School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. More families named it first than it had places in 6 of those years. In the other 6 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — 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 Herschel Grammar School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.6 1.3 1.9 2.5 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 1.69 per place 188 first choices 111 places 2016/17 2.01 per place 251 first choices 125 places 2017/18 1.26 per place 189 first choices 150 places 2018/19 1.55 per place 234 first choices 151 places 2019/20 1.29 per place 217 first choices 168 places 2020/21 0.9 per place 132 first choices 147 places 2021/22 2.33 per place 282 first choices 121 places 2022/23 0.86 per place 127 first choices 147 places 2023/24 0.87 per place 131 first choices 151 places 2024/25 0.7 per place 105 first choices 149 places 2025/26 0.86 per place 126 first choices 146 places 2026/27 0.8 per place 119 first choices 149 places
First preferences per place at Herschel Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 119 first preferences for 149 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Herschel Grammar School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 111 188 74 1.69
2016/17 125 251 54 2.01
2017/18 150 189 74 1.26
2018/19 151 234 79 1.55
2019/20 168 217 81 1.29
2020/21 147 132 47 0.9
2021/22 121 282 54 2.33
2022/23 147 127 49 0.86
2023/24 151 131 51 0.87
2024/25 149 105 42 0.7
2025/26 146 126 46 0.86
2026/27 149 119 41 0.8

Places offered

149

in 2026/27

Named first choice

119

1,066 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

34.5%

41 of 119

Offers to families outside the council

62%

92 of 149 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Herschel Grammar School published for 2027 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 Herschel Grammar School, 2027 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 A 'looked after child' or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an adoption, child arrangements, or special guardianship order including those who appear [to the admission authority] to have been in state care outside of England and ceased to be in state care as a result of being adopted. A looked-after child is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in Section 22(1) of the Children Act 1989). […] criterion continues in the source document
2 The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 – Part III sets out the statutory basis for school admissions and the determination of admission arrangements by admission authorities.
3 The School Admissions Code (2021) – statutory guidance issued under section 84 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, governing all aspects of school admissions, including oversubscription criteria, waiting lists and in-year admissions.
4 The School Admission Appeals Code (2012, as amended 2022) – statutory guidance setting out the procedures for the conduct of admission appeals.
5 The Children and Families Act 2014, sections 37 and 39 – relating to Education, Health and Care (EHC) Plans and the naming of schools by local authorities.
6 The Children Act 1989, sections 20, 22(1), 31 and 38 – defining the term ‘looked after children’ and the legal responsibilities of local authorities.
7 The School Information (England) Regulations 2008 – setting out the statutory information which schools must publish about their admission arrangements. Herschel Grammar School, as its own admission authority, determines these arrangements annually in line with the requirements of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 and the School Admissions Code (2021). Appendix 1 Herschel Grammar School As specified in section 5(ii) of our Admissions Arrangements for September 2027 Entry. Priority will be given to pupils living within the school catchment area, which is defined as a home address within 4 miles of the school. […] criterion continues in the source document

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 2027 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.

Herschel Grammar School's determined admission arrangements for 2027 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

750

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

750

100% of capacity

Unfilled places

0

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

320

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 Herschel Grammar 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 Herschel Grammar 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Herschel Grammar School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 900 places 951 on roll 2012/13 900 places 896 on roll 2013/14 900 places 894 on roll 2014/15 900 places 908 on roll 2015/16 900 places 913 on roll 2016/17 900 places 938 on roll 2017/18 900 places 956 on roll 2018/19 900 places 975 on roll 2020/21 1,020 places 1,063 on roll 2021/22 1,070 places 1,079 on roll 2022/23 1,070 places 1,067 on roll 2023/24 1,070 places 1,056 on roll 2024/25 1,070 places 1,056 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. Herschel Grammar School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Herschel Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
14 December 2018 Arrangements did not comply ADA3366

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
Slough

Postcode SL1 3BW. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137726).

Other contested secondary schools in Slough

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.