School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Kingsdown School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 21 families who named Kingsdown School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 232 and 237 put it first.

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

1.02

first choices for every place available

237 first preferences for 232 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Kingsdown School

There is no published appeal success rate for Kingsdown 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 Swindon 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 Swindon, 15.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 25 of 163 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 Swindon.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Swindon 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

Kingsdown School turned first-choice families away in 2 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 Kingsdown 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 0.98 per place 234 first choices 239 places 2016/17 0.95 per place 206 first choices 216 places 2017/18 0.89 per place 176 first choices 197 places 2018/19 0.84 per place 157 first choices 187 places 2019/20 0.88 per place 151 first choices 172 places 2020/21 0.84 per place 137 first choices 164 places 2021/22 0.82 per place 142 first choices 174 places 2022/23 0.77 per place 173 first choices 225 places 2023/24 1.01 per place 233 first choices 230 places 2024/25 0.93 per place 217 first choices 233 places 2025/26 0.89 per place 206 first choices 232 places 2026/27 1.02 per place 237 first choices 232 places
First preferences per place at Kingsdown School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 237 first preferences for 232 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Kingsdown School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 239 234 234 0.98
2016/17 216 206 206 0.95
2017/18 197 176 176 0.89
2018/19 187 157 157 0.84
2019/20 172 151 151 0.88
2020/21 164 137 137 0.84
2021/22 174 142 142 0.82
2022/23 225 173 173 0.77
2023/24 230 233 223 1.01
2024/25 233 217 212 0.93
2025/26 232 206 206 0.89
2026/27 232 237 216 1.02

Places offered

232

in 2026/27

Named first choice

237

393 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

91.1%

216 of 237

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 232 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 137265.

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

1,260

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,031

81.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

229

across Years 7 to 11

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 Kingsdown 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 Kingsdown School reported 229 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 81.8% 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Kingsdown School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,260 places 1,245 on roll 2012/13 1,260 places 1,205 on roll 2013/14 1,668 places 1,200 on roll 2014/15 1,668 places 1,186 on roll 2015/16 1,668 places 1,174 on roll 2016/17 1,668 places 1,146 on roll 2017/18 1,668 places 1,095 on roll 2018/19 1,668 places 1,015 on roll 2020/21 1,260 places 898 on roll 2021/22 1,260 places 896 on roll 2022/23 1,260 places 941 on roll 2023/24 1,260 places 989 on roll 2024/25 1,260 places 1,031 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
Swindon

Postcode SN2 7SH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 145139).

Other contested secondary schools in Swindon

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.