School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Cobham Free School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 40 families who named Cobham Free School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 60 and 93 put it first.

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

1.55

first choices for every place available

93 first preferences for 60 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Cobham Free School

There is no published appeal success rate for Cobham Free 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

Cobham Free 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 Cobham Free 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 0.87 per place 60 first choices 69 places 2016/17 1.36 per place 61 first choices 45 places 2017/18 2.11 per place 97 first choices 46 places 2018/19 1.48 per place 77 first choices 52 places 2019/20 1.75 per place 100 first choices 57 places 2020/21 1.05 per place 91 first choices 87 places 2021/22 1.28 per place 111 first choices 87 places 2022/23 2.13 per place 179 first choices 84 places 2023/24 2.53 per place 152 first choices 60 places 2024/25 2.37 per place 140 first choices 59 places 2025/26 1.92 per place 113 first choices 59 places 2026/27 1.55 per place 93 first choices 60 places
First preferences per place at Cobham Free School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 93 first preferences for 60 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Cobham Free 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 69 60 39 0.87
2016/17 45 61 32 1.36
2017/18 46 97 40 2.11
2018/19 52 77 46 1.48
2019/20 57 100 47 1.75
2020/21 87 91 69 1.05
2021/22 87 111 80 1.28
2022/23 84 179 81 2.13
2023/24 60 152 58 2.53
2024/25 59 140 57 2.37
2025/26 59 113 56 1.92
2026/27 60 93 53 1.55

Places offered

60

in 2026/27

Named first choice

93

407 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

57%

53 of 93

Offers to families outside the council

3%

2 of 60 offers

How close you had to live

Cobham Free School filled its places in 2024, and 1,429m — 0.89 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 7 , which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

0.89 mi

1,429 metres, 2024

Under criterion

7

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.

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

856

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

857

100.1% of capacity

Over its capacity by

1

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

152

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 Cobham Free 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 Cobham Free 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, 2012/13 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Cobham Free School from 2012/13 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 550 1,100 places on roll 12/13 14/15 16/17 18/19 21/22 23/24 24/25 2012/13 161 places 69 on roll 2013/14 161 places 115 on roll 2014/15 528 places 208 on roll 2015/16 528 places 310 on roll 2016/17 552 places 402 on roll 2017/18 552 places 472 on roll 2018/19 552 places 542 on roll 2020/21 1,008 places 642 on roll 2021/22 1,008 places 836 on roll 2022/23 1,008 places 926 on roll 2023/24 1,008 places 945 on roll 2024/25 1,008 places 965 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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Surrey

Postcode KT11 1TF. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 138226).

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.