School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Reigate School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 61 families who named Reigate School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 255 and 297 put it first.

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

1.16

first choices for every place available

297 first preferences for 255 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Reigate School

There is no published appeal success rate for Reigate 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

Reigate 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 Reigate 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 1.34 per place 336 first choices 250 places 2016/17 1.32 per place 325 first choices 247 places 2017/18 1.22 per place 314 first choices 258 places 2018/19 1.33 per place 344 first choices 258 places 2019/20 1.25 per place 323 first choices 258 places 2020/21 1.28 per place 321 first choices 250 places 2021/22 1.47 per place 371 first choices 252 places 2022/23 1.39 per place 351 first choices 252 places 2023/24 1.3 per place 333 first choices 256 places 2024/25 1.25 per place 316 first choices 253 places 2025/26 1.24 per place 307 first choices 248 places 2026/27 1.16 per place 297 first choices 255 places
First preferences per place at Reigate School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 297 first preferences for 255 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Reigate School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 250 336 242 1.34
2016/17 247 325 239 1.32
2017/18 258 314 237 1.22
2018/19 258 344 241 1.33
2019/20 258 323 240 1.25
2020/21 250 321 230 1.28
2021/22 252 371 237 1.47
2022/23 252 351 247 1.39
2023/24 256 333 249 1.3
2024/25 253 316 241 1.25
2025/26 248 307 233 1.24
2026/27 255 297 236 1.16

Places offered

255

in 2026/27

Named first choice

297

792 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

79.5%

236 of 297

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 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 125257.

How close you had to live

Reigate School filled its places in 2024, and 1,954m — 1.21 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 5 , which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

1.21 mi

1,954 metres, 2024

Under criterion

5

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

1,250

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,261

100.9% of capacity

Over its capacity by

11

reported as full or beyond

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 Reigate 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 Reigate 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 Reigate School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,201 places 1,229 on roll 2010/11 1,201 places 1,249 on roll 2011/12 1,250 places 1,225 on roll 2012/13 1,250 places 1,250 on roll 2013/14 1,250 places 1,248 on roll 2014/15 1,250 places 1,242 on roll 2015/16 1,250 places 1,241 on roll 2016/17 1,250 places 1,238 on roll 2017/18 1,250 places 1,248 on roll 2018/19 1,250 places 1,262 on roll 2020/21 1,250 places 1,270 on roll 2021/22 1,250 places 1,260 on roll 2022/23 1,250 places 1,252 on roll 2023/24 1,250 places 1,261 on roll 2024/25 1,250 places 1,261 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
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Surrey

Postcode RH2 7NT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 145217).

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.