School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Ashcombe School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 53 families who named The Ashcombe School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 223 and 268 put it first.

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

1.20

first choices for every place available

268 first preferences for 223 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Ashcombe School

There is no published appeal success rate for The Ashcombe 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

The Ashcombe School turned first-choice families away in 10 of the last 12 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at The Ashcombe 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 1.05 per place 245 first choices 233 places 2016/17 0.98 per place 235 first choices 240 places 2017/18 1.08 per place 259 first choices 239 places 2018/19 0.92 per place 218 first choices 237 places 2019/20 1.22 per place 288 first choices 237 places 2020/21 1.13 per place 265 first choices 234 places 2021/22 1.18 per place 280 first choices 237 places 2022/23 1.17 per place 278 first choices 237 places 2023/24 1.09 per place 259 first choices 238 places 2024/25 1.06 per place 248 first choices 234 places 2025/26 1.15 per place 268 first choices 233 places 2026/27 1.2 per place 268 first choices 223 places
First preferences per place at The Ashcombe School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 268 first preferences for 223 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Ashcombe School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 233 245 210 1.05
2016/17 240 235 220 0.98
2017/18 239 259 225 1.08
2018/19 237 218 205 0.92
2019/20 237 288 230 1.22
2020/21 234 265 217 1.13
2021/22 237 280 230 1.18
2022/23 237 278 230 1.17
2023/24 238 259 229 1.09
2024/25 234 248 227 1.06
2025/26 233 268 223 1.15
2026/27 223 268 215 1.2

Places offered

223

in 2026/27

Named first choice

268

644 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

80.2%

215 of 268

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 223 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 125264.

How close you had to live

The Ashcombe School filled its places in 2024, and 7,593m — 4.72 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

4.72 mi

7,593 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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria The Ashcombe School published for 2026 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 The Ashcombe School, 2026 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 Looked after and previously looked after children .................................................................... 3
2 Exceptional social/medical need................................................................................................ 4
3 Children of a member of staff .................................................................................................... 4
4 Siblings ....................................................................................................................................... 5
5 Any Other Children..................................................................................................................... 5
6 Home address ............................................................................................................................ 5
7 Tie breaker and the admission of twins, triplets, other multiple births or siblings born in the same academic year ................................................................................................................... 5
8 Waiting lists ................................................................................................................................ 6
9 In-year admissions ..................................................................................................................... 6
10 The admission of children outside of their chronological year group ....................................... 6
11 Providing false or misleading information ................................................................................. 7
12 Home to school transport .......................................................................................................... 7 SCC weblinks: ...................................................................................................................................... 7 Appendix 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 8 Supplementary information form for applicants applying under the criterion for Children of Staff at The Ashcombe School – 2026/27 .................................................................................................. […] criterion continues in the source document
13 Looked after and previously looked after children (see Note 1)
14 Exceptional social/medical need (see Note 2)
15 Children of a member of staff (see Note 3)
16 Siblings (See Note 4)
17 Any other children (see Note 5) If within any category there are more children than places available, any remaining places will be offered to children who meet that criterion on the basis of proximity of the child’s home address to the School. The distance will be measured in a straight line from the address point of the child’s home address, as set by Ordnance Survey to the nearest official school gate for students to use. This is calculated using the admissions team’s Geographical Information System.

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 2026 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.

The Ashcombe School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,191

99.2% of capacity

Unfilled places

9

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

276

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 The Ashcombe 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 The Ashcombe School reported 9 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.2% 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Ashcombe 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 1,476 places 1,516 on roll 2010/11 1,476 places 1,493 on roll 2011/12 1,478 places 1,481 on roll 2012/13 1,478 places 1,459 on roll 2013/14 1,478 places 1,468 on roll 2014/15 1,478 places 1,414 on roll 2015/16 1,478 places 1,411 on roll 2016/17 1,478 places 1,415 on roll 2017/18 1,478 places 1,393 on roll 2018/19 1,478 places 1,399 on roll 2020/21 1,490 places 1,464 on roll 2021/22 1,490 places 1,468 on roll 2022/23 1,490 places 1,472 on roll 2023/24 1,490 places 1,494 on roll 2024/25 1,476 places 1,508 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 RH4 1LY. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 143901).

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.