School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Tomlinscote School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 92 families who named Tomlinscote School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 294 and 377 put it first.

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

1.28

first choices for every place available

377 first preferences for 294 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Tomlinscote School

There is no published appeal success rate for Tomlinscote 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

Tomlinscote School turned first-choice families away in 11 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 Tomlinscote 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 1.2 per place 317 first choices 264 places 2016/17 1.33 per place 348 first choices 262 places 2017/18 1.08 per place 321 first choices 297 places 2018/19 0.92 per place 270 first choices 293 places 2019/20 1.08 per place 322 first choices 298 places 2020/21 1.01 per place 315 first choices 312 places 2021/22 1.03 per place 322 first choices 312 places 2022/23 1.2 per place 373 first choices 311 places 2023/24 1.31 per place 387 first choices 295 places 2024/25 1.18 per place 350 first choices 297 places 2025/26 1.15 per place 335 first choices 292 places 2026/27 1.28 per place 377 first choices 294 places
First preferences per place at Tomlinscote School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 377 first preferences for 294 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Tomlinscote School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 264 317 253 1.2
2016/17 262 348 259 1.33
2017/18 297 321 288 1.08
2018/19 293 270 266 0.92
2019/20 298 322 288 1.08
2020/21 312 315 287 1.01
2021/22 312 322 283 1.03
2022/23 311 373 294 1.2
2023/24 295 387 286 1.31
2024/25 297 350 285 1.18
2025/26 292 335 276 1.15
2026/27 294 377 285 1.28

Places offered

294

in 2026/27

Named first choice

377

765 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75.6%

285 of 377

Offers to families outside the council

1%

2 of 294 offers

How close you had to live

Tomlinscote School filled its places in 2024, and 2,499m — 1.55 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

1.55 mi

2,499 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

1,500

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,504

100.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

4

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 Tomlinscote 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 Tomlinscote 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Tomlinscote School from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 1,635 places 1,642 on roll 2014/15 1,635 places 1,613 on roll 2015/16 1,635 places 1,593 on roll 2016/17 1,635 places 1,563 on roll 2017/18 1,665 places 1,542 on roll 2018/19 1,665 places 1,489 on roll 2020/21 1,635 places 1,433 on roll 2021/22 1,635 places 1,471 on roll 2022/23 1,500 places 1,500 on roll 2023/24 1,500 places 1,509 on roll 2024/25 1,500 places 1,504 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 GU16 8PY. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140117).

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.