School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at St Peter's Catholic School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 65 families who named St Peter's Catholic School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 206 and 260 put it first.

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

1.26

first choices for every place available

260 first preferences for 206 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at St Peter's Catholic School

There is no published appeal success rate for St Peter's 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

St Peter's 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 St Peter's 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 1.47 per place 252 first choices 172 places 2016/17 1.26 per place 226 first choices 179 places 2017/18 1.2 per place 249 first choices 207 places 2018/19 1.07 per place 220 first choices 205 places 2019/20 1.14 per place 231 first choices 203 places 2020/21 1.31 per place 264 first choices 202 places 2021/22 1.36 per place 273 first choices 201 places 2022/23 1.27 per place 256 first choices 202 places 2023/24 1.29 per place 265 first choices 206 places 2024/25 1.14 per place 234 first choices 206 places 2025/26 1.4 per place 285 first choices 204 places 2026/27 1.26 per place 260 first choices 206 places
First preferences per place at St Peter's Catholic School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 260 first preferences for 206 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at St Peter's 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
2015/16 172 252 160 1.47
2016/17 179 226 169 1.26
2017/18 207 249 199 1.2
2018/19 205 220 192 1.07
2019/20 203 231 189 1.14
2020/21 202 264 190 1.31
2021/22 201 273 193 1.36
2022/23 202 256 193 1.27
2023/24 206 265 202 1.29
2024/25 206 234 192 1.14
2025/26 204 285 200 1.4
2026/27 206 260 195 1.26

Places offered

206

in 2026/27

Named first choice

260

713 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75%

195 of 260

Offers to families outside the council

4%

9 of 206 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 125276.

How close you had to live

St Peter's Catholic School filled its places in 2024, and 4,271m — 2.65 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

2.65 mi

4,271 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.

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

1,020

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,051

103% of capacity

Over its capacity by

31

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

215

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 St Peter's 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 St Peter's 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 St Peter's Catholic School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,050 places 1,118 on roll 2010/11 1,050 places 1,089 on roll 2011/12 1,050 places 1,092 on roll 2012/13 1,050 places 1,085 on roll 2013/14 1,050 places 1,108 on roll 2014/15 1,120 places 1,113 on roll 2015/16 1,120 places 1,118 on roll 2016/17 1,120 places 1,095 on roll 2017/18 1,270 places 1,108 on roll 2018/19 1,270 places 1,196 on roll 2020/21 1,235 places 1,289 on roll 2021/22 1,235 places 1,302 on roll 2022/23 1,235 places 1,328 on roll 2023/24 1,235 places 1,348 on roll 2024/25 1,235 places 1,344 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 GU1 2TN. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 147430).

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.