School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Esher Church of England High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 13 families who named Esher Church of England High School as their first choice did not get a place: 136 put it first and 123 of them were offered one.

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

13

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

136 first preferences for 244 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Esher Church of England High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Esher Church of England High 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

Esher Church of England High School turned first-choice families away in 6 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 3 of those years. In the other 3 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 Esher Church of England High 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 1.02 per place 236 first choices 232 places 2016/17 1.11 per place 266 first choices 239 places 2017/18 1.01 per place 254 first choices 251 places 2018/19 0.95 per place 261 first choices 276 places 2019/20 0.89 per place 244 first choices 274 places 2020/21 0.84 per place 231 first choices 275 places 2021/22 0.74 per place 208 first choices 282 places 2022/23 0.75 per place 241 first choices 321 places 2023/24 0.63 per place 187 first choices 295 places 2024/25 0.64 per place 163 first choices 256 places 2025/26 0.68 per place 196 first choices 287 places 2026/27 0.56 per place 136 first choices 244 places
First preferences per place at Esher Church of England High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 136 first preferences for 244 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Esher Church of England High School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 232 236 192 1.02
2016/17 239 266 210 1.11
2017/18 251 254 211 1.01
2018/19 276 261 222 0.95
2019/20 274 244 219 0.89
2020/21 275 231 216 0.84
2021/22 282 208 202 0.74
2022/23 321 241 232 0.75
2023/24 295 187 187 0.63
2024/25 256 163 161 0.64
2025/26 287 196 159 0.68
2026/27 244 136 123 0.56

Places offered

244

in 2026/27

Named first choice

136

645 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

90.4%

123 of 136

Offers to families outside the council

1%

2 of 244 offers

How close you had to live

Every applicant was offered a place at Esher Church of England High School in 2024. That is the most recent round Surrey has published, and it means there was no cut-off that year — nobody was turned away for living too far, so no distance exists to be measured against.

Last place offered at

No cut-off

everyone who applied was offered, 2024

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because of how far from the school you live, and cannot allow it because you live close by. No cut-off applied here in any round Surrey has published — the school offered a place to everyone who asked for one. 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.

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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,127

93.9% of capacity

Unfilled places

73

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

0

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 Esher Church of England High 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 Esher Church of England High School reported 73 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 93.9% 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Esher Church of England High School from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 600 1,200 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 1,025 places 1,091 on roll 2014/15 1,025 places 1,063 on roll 2015/16 1,200 places 1,052 on roll 2016/17 1,200 places 1,073 on roll 2017/18 1,200 places 1,099 on roll 2018/19 1,200 places 1,113 on roll 2020/21 1,200 places 1,145 on roll 2021/22 1,200 places 1,165 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 1,169 on roll 2023/24 1,200 places 1,169 on roll 2024/25 1,200 places 1,127 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. Esher Church of England High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Esher Church of England High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
23 July 2018 No fault found ADA3432

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
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Surrey

Postcode KT10 8AP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140650).

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.