School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Westcliff High School for Girls?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 79 families who named Westcliff High School for Girls as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 185 and 239 put it first.

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

1.29

first choices for every place available

239 first preferences for 185 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Westcliff High School for Girls

There is no published appeal success rate for Westcliff High School for Girls, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Southend-on-Sea 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 Southend-on-Sea, 4.7% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 13 of 277 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 Southend-on-Sea.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Southend-on-Sea 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

Westcliff High School for Girls 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 Westcliff High School for Girls, 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 1.24 per place 224 first choices 181 places 2016/17 1.21 per place 215 first choices 178 places 2017/18 1.28 per place 230 first choices 180 places 2018/19 1.52 per place 278 first choices 183 places 2019/20 1.77 per place 313 first choices 177 places 2020/21 1.75 per place 266 first choices 152 places 2021/22 2.55 per place 466 first choices 183 places 2022/23 1.3 per place 237 first choices 182 places 2023/24 1.37 per place 228 first choices 167 places 2024/25 1.64 per place 262 first choices 160 places 2025/26 1.7 per place 302 first choices 178 places 2026/27 1.29 per place 239 first choices 185 places
First preferences per place at Westcliff High School for Girls. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 239 first preferences for 185 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Westcliff High School for Girls, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 181 224 146 1.24
2016/17 178 215 131 1.21
2017/18 180 230 147 1.28
2018/19 183 278 142 1.52
2019/20 177 313 158 1.77
2020/21 152 266 142 1.75
2021/22 183 466 167 2.55
2022/23 182 237 159 1.3
2023/24 167 228 144 1.37
2024/25 160 262 149 1.64
2025/26 178 302 162 1.7
2026/27 185 239 160 1.29

Places offered

185

in 2026/27

Named first choice

239

856 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

66.9%

160 of 239

Offers to families outside the council

54%

100 of 185 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

920

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

922

100.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

2

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

428

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 Westcliff High School for Girls 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 Westcliff High School for Girls 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 Westcliff High School for Girls from 2010/11 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2010/11 1,224 places 1,041 on roll 2011/12 1,053 places 1,089 on roll 2012/13 1,224 places 1,097 on roll 2013/14 1,224 places 1,090 on roll 2014/15 1,224 places 1,128 on roll 2015/16 1,224 places 1,145 on roll 2016/17 1,224 places 1,172 on roll 2017/18 1,224 places 1,227 on roll 2018/19 1,224 places 1,267 on roll 2020/21 1,224 places 1,300 on roll 2021/22 1,348 places 1,344 on roll 2022/23 1,348 places 1,329 on roll 2023/24 1,348 places 1,297 on roll 2024/25 1,348 places 1,345 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. Westcliff High School for Girls has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Westcliff High School for Girls. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
24 October 2019 No fault found ADA3587

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
Southend-on-Sea

Postcode SS0 0BS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136490).

Other contested secondary schools in Southend-on-Sea

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.