School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Upton Court Grammar School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 111 families who named Upton Court Grammar School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 165 and 195 put it first.

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

1.18

first choices for every place available

195 first preferences for 165 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Upton Court Grammar School

There is no published appeal success rate for Upton Court 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

Upton Court 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 11 of those years. In the other 1 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 Upton Court Grammar School, 2015/16 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.8 1.5 2.3 3.0 one first preference per place 15/16 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2015/16 0.96 per place 153 first choices 160 places 2016/17 1.39 per place 228 first choices 164 places 2017/18 1.07 per place 187 first choices 174 places 2018/19 1.39 per place 253 first choices 182 places 2019/20 1.85 per place 323 first choices 175 places 2020/21 1.62 per place 251 first choices 155 places 2021/22 2.66 per place 388 first choices 146 places 2022/23 1.62 per place 262 first choices 162 places 2023/24 1.43 per place 231 first choices 161 places 2024/25 1.29 per place 211 first choices 164 places 2025/26 1.36 per place 222 first choices 163 places 2026/27 1.18 per place 195 first choices 165 places
First preferences per place at Upton Court Grammar School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 195 first preferences for 165 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Upton Court 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
2015/16 160 153 58 0.96
2016/17 164 228 48 1.39
2017/18 174 187 70 1.07
2018/19 182 253 92 1.39
2019/20 175 323 114 1.85
2020/21 155 251 117 1.62
2021/22 146 388 95 2.66
2022/23 162 262 102 1.62
2023/24 161 231 103 1.43
2024/25 164 211 93 1.29
2025/26 163 222 93 1.36
2026/27 165 195 84 1.18

Places offered

165

in 2026/27

Named first choice

195

1,274 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

43.1%

84 of 195

Offers to families outside the council

58%

95 of 165 offers

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Upton Court Grammar 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 Upton Court Grammar 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 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 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 distance the pupil lives from the school, measured in a straight line, using the Local Authority’s computerised mapping system, with those living closer to the school receiving the higher priority. The distance will be measured from the address point of the pupil’s permanent home address to the main school reception of the main school site. Tiebreaker: If applying these criteria results in there being more children within any of the above categories than the number of available places, the tie break will be the distance the pupil lives from the school, measured in a straight line, using the Local Authority’s computerised mapping system, with those living closer to the school receiving […] 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 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.

Upton Court Grammar 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

890

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

827

92.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

63

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

330

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 Upton Court 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 Upton Court Grammar School reported 63 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 92.9% 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, 2010/11 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Upton Court Grammar School from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,115 places 1,104 on roll 2011/12 1,115 places 1,094 on roll 2012/13 1,115 places 1,079 on roll 2013/14 1,115 places 1,062 on roll 2014/15 1,115 places 1,088 on roll 2015/16 1,115 places 1,024 on roll 2016/17 1,115 places 1,006 on roll 2017/18 1,115 places 991 on roll 2018/19 1,115 places 1,029 on roll 2020/21 1,115 places 1,072 on roll 2021/22 1,155 places 1,110 on roll 2022/23 1,155 places 1,150 on roll 2023/24 1,155 places 1,157 on roll 2024/25 1,220 places 1,166 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. Upton Court Grammar School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in each of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Upton Court Grammar School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
11 October 2021 Arrangements did not comply ADA3774
7 June 2017 Arrangements did not comply ADA3270

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 SL3 7PR. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136420).

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.