School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Woking High School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 71 families who named Woking High School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 228 and 285 put it first.

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

1.25

first choices for every place available

285 first preferences for 228 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Woking High School

There is no published appeal success rate for Woking 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

Woking High 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 Woking 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 1.08 per place 248 first choices 229 places 2016/17 1.18 per place 277 first choices 235 places 2017/18 1.15 per place 266 first choices 232 places 2018/19 1.26 per place 296 first choices 235 places 2019/20 1.12 per place 265 first choices 237 places 2020/21 1.4 per place 321 first choices 230 places 2021/22 1.21 per place 282 first choices 233 places 2022/23 1.1 per place 255 first choices 232 places 2023/24 1.1 per place 271 first choices 246 places 2024/25 1.08 per place 268 first choices 248 places 2025/26 1.19 per place 277 first choices 233 places 2026/27 1.25 per place 285 first choices 228 places
First preferences per place at Woking High School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 285 first preferences for 228 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Woking 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
2015/16 229 248 204 1.08
2016/17 235 277 217 1.18
2017/18 232 266 210 1.15
2018/19 235 296 206 1.26
2019/20 237 265 200 1.12
2020/21 230 321 213 1.4
2021/22 233 282 211 1.21
2022/23 232 255 208 1.1
2023/24 246 271 217 1.1
2024/25 248 268 230 1.08
2025/26 233 277 209 1.19
2026/27 228 285 214 1.25

Places offered

228

in 2026/27

Named first choice

285

765 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

75.1%

214 of 285

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 228 offers

How close you had to live

Woking High School filled its places in 2024, and 3,134m — 1.95 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 6 , which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

1.95 mi

3,134 metres, 2024

Under criterion

6

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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,209

100.8% of capacity

Over its capacity by

9

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 Woking 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 Woking High 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 Woking High School from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 650 1,300 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 1,109 places 1,157 on roll 2014/15 1,109 places 1,176 on roll 2015/16 1,109 places 1,173 on roll 2016/17 1,109 places 1,194 on roll 2017/18 1,109 places 1,191 on roll 2018/19 1,109 places 1,198 on roll 2020/21 1,200 places 1,196 on roll 2021/22 1,200 places 1,203 on roll 2022/23 1,200 places 1,201 on roll 2023/24 1,200 places 1,198 on roll 2024/25 1,200 places 1,209 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. Woking High School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Woking High School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
26 November 2025 Arrangements did not comply REF4551

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
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Surrey

Postcode GU21 4TJ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139993).

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.