School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at All Hallows Catholic School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 109 families who named All Hallows Catholic School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 255 and 358 put it first.

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

1.40

first choices for every place available

358 first preferences for 255 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at All Hallows Catholic School

There is no published appeal success rate for All Hallows Catholic 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 Surrey 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 Surrey, 21.2% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 215 of 1,016 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 Surrey.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Surrey 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

All Hallows Catholic 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 All Hallows Catholic 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 1.28 per place 358 first choices 279 places 2016/17 1.27 per place 354 first choices 279 places 2017/18 1.47 per place 390 first choices 266 places 2018/19 1.22 per place 336 first choices 275 places 2019/20 1.4 per place 347 first choices 248 places 2020/21 1.32 per place 335 first choices 253 places 2021/22 1.22 per place 324 first choices 265 places 2022/23 1.25 per place 328 first choices 263 places 2023/24 1.1 per place 289 first choices 263 places 2024/25 1.2 per place 316 first choices 264 places 2025/26 1.14 per place 297 first choices 260 places 2026/27 1.4 per place 358 first choices 255 places
First preferences per place at All Hallows Catholic School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 358 first preferences for 255 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at All Hallows Catholic School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 279 358 270 1.28
2016/17 279 354 275 1.27
2017/18 266 390 257 1.47
2018/19 275 336 263 1.22
2019/20 248 347 241 1.4
2020/21 253 335 248 1.32
2021/22 265 324 253 1.22
2022/23 263 328 250 1.25
2023/24 263 289 240 1.1
2024/25 264 316 249 1.2
2025/26 260 297 238 1.14
2026/27 255 358 249 1.4

Places offered

255

in 2026/27

Named first choice

358

729 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

69.6%

249 of 358

Offers to families outside the council

73%

185 of 255 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 125315.

How close you had to live

All Hallows Catholic School filled its places in 2024, and 1,601m — 0.99 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 8 , which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

0.99 mi

1,601 metres, 2024

Under criterion

8

as numbered by the school

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because you live beyond this distance, and cannot allow it because you live inside. The cut-off describes how the arrangements were applied to last year's applicants. At the first stage the panel asks whether the arrangements were lawful and applied to you correctly; at the second it weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil. Neither question has a distance in it. Families further out than this figure win appeals, and families inside it did not need one.

It also changes every year, because it is set by who happened to apply, not by a boundary the school draws. Last year's figure does not tell you this year's.

Surrey Council, allocation statistics for 2024. Source document. Published under the Open Government Licence. Cut-off distances are not a statutory publication — the School Information (England) Regulations 2008 require only the admission number and the preferences received — so a council publishes these voluntarily and many publish none at all.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria All Hallows Catholic 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 All Hallows Catholic 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 Catholic Looked After/Previously Looked After children (see notes 2 & 3).
2 Baptised Catholic Siblings (see notes 3 & 6) of children already in attendance at All Hallows Catholic School & College, whose application is accompanied by an original Baptismal Certificate; or siblings who have been received into the Catholic Church and whose application is accompanied by an original letter or Certificate of Reception.
3 Baptised Catholic children (see note 3) currently attending one of the following feeder schools, whose application is accompanied by an original Baptismal Certificate: St. Joseph’s Aldershot/ St. Polycarp’s/ St. Bernadette’s/ St. Augustine’s/St. Patrick’s.
4 Baptised Catholic (see note 3) children whose application is accompanied by an original Baptismal Certificate; or children who have been received into the Catholic Church and whose application is accompanied by an original letter or Certificate of Reception.
5 Other looked after/previously looked after children (see note 2).
6 Other Children, who are not baptised Catholic, with a sibling (see note 6) already in attendance at All Hallows Catholic School & College.
7 Priority will be given to children of staff who are employed at All Hallows Catholic School by the Mother Teresa Catholic Academy Trust. To qualify, the staff member must either:  have been employed by All Hallows Catholic School for 2 or more years as at the final date for normal admissions applications, ie. 31 October 2026 for Year 7 enrolment in September 2027. For in-year applications, the length of employment will be considered as 2 years prior to the date of application. In addition, their Contract of Employment must demonstrate their employment address/place of work as All Hallows Catholic School, Weybourne Road, Farnham Surrey GU9 9HF. […] 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.

All Hallows Catholic 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

1,203

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,228

102.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

25

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

250

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 All Hallows Catholic 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 All Hallows Catholic 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at All Hallows Catholic School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,236 places 1,338 on roll 2010/11 1,236 places 1,393 on roll 2011/12 1,374 places 1,401 on roll 2012/13 1,374 places 1,408 on roll 2013/14 1,374 places 1,411 on roll 2014/15 1,374 places 1,390 on roll 2015/16 1,346 places 1,394 on roll 2016/17 1,346 places 1,423 on roll 2017/18 1,346 places 1,426 on roll 2018/19 1,346 places 1,446 on roll 2020/21 1,395 places 1,414 on roll 2021/22 1,395 places 1,380 on roll 2022/23 1,398 places 1,399 on roll 2023/24 1,405 places 1,456 on roll 2024/25 1,453 places 1,507 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.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Academy converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Surrey

Postcode GU9 9HF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 151190).

Other contested secondary schools in Surrey

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.