School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Central Foundation Girls' School?

In 2026/27, Central Foundation Girls' School offered 214 places and 170 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.79

first choices for every place available

170 first preferences for 214 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Central Foundation Girls' School

There is no published appeal success rate for Central Foundation Girls' 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 Tower Hamlets 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 Tower Hamlets, 2.3% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 15 of 662 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 Tower Hamlets.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Tower Hamlets 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

Central Foundation Girls' School turned first-choice families away in 11 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 5 of those years. In the other 6 it had places on paper and still turned first-choice families away — which happens where families who may not meet a school's criteria rank it below a safer choice — common at selective, faith and single-sex schools, and it means the first-preference count understates how wanted the school is.

First preferences per place at Central Foundation Girls' 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 0.8 per place 192 first choices 240 places 2016/17 1.01 per place 241 first choices 239 places 2017/18 0.91 per place 216 first choices 237 places 2018/19 0.81 per place 194 first choices 239 places 2019/20 1.15 per place 273 first choices 237 places 2020/21 0.97 per place 231 first choices 238 places 2021/22 1.11 per place 264 first choices 238 places 2022/23 1.02 per place 241 first choices 236 places 2023/24 1.01 per place 231 first choices 228 places 2024/25 0.91 per place 210 first choices 232 places 2025/26 0.9 per place 209 first choices 232 places 2026/27 0.79 per place 170 first choices 214 places
First preferences per place at Central Foundation Girls' School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 170 first preferences for 214 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Central Foundation Girls' School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 240 192 171 0.8
2016/17 239 241 205 1.01
2017/18 237 216 180 0.91
2018/19 239 194 167 0.81
2019/20 237 273 202 1.15
2020/21 238 231 194 0.97
2021/22 238 264 196 1.11
2022/23 236 241 196 1.02
2023/24 228 231 176 1.01
2024/25 232 210 187 0.91
2025/26 232 209 186 0.9
2026/27 214 170 170 0.79

Places offered

214

in 2026/27

Named first choice

170

445 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

170 of 170

Offers to families outside the council

5%

11 of 208 offers

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

1,122

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,183

105.4% of capacity

Over its capacity by

61

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

350

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 Central Foundation Girls' 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 Central Foundation Girls' 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 Central Foundation Girls' 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 1,406 places 1,386 on roll 2010/11 1,406 places 1,390 on roll 2011/12 1,406 places 1,414 on roll 2012/13 1,406 places 1,470 on roll 2013/14 1,406 places 1,496 on roll 2014/15 1,472 places 1,470 on roll 2015/16 1,472 places 1,490 on roll 2016/17 1,472 places 1,498 on roll 2017/18 1,472 places 1,514 on roll 2018/19 1,472 places 1,482 on roll 2020/21 1,472 places 1,530 on roll 2021/22 1,472 places 1,550 on roll 2022/23 1,472 places 1,532 on roll 2023/24 1,472 places 1,514 on roll 2024/25 1,472 places 1,542 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. Central Foundation Girls' School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Central Foundation Girls' School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
15 July 2020 No fault found VAR936

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
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Tower Hamlets

Postcode E3 2AE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 100975).

Other contested secondary schools in Tower Hamlets

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.