School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bohunt Horsham?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 79 families who named Bohunt Horsham as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 234 and 305 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in West Sussex actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 7 years of official figures.

1.30

first choices for every place available

305 first preferences for 234 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bohunt Horsham

There is no published appeal success rate for Bohunt Horsham, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for West Sussex 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 West Sussex, 19.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 239 of 1,199 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 West Sussex.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not West Sussex 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

Bohunt Horsham turned first-choice families away in 4 of the last 7 years. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Bohunt Horsham, 2020/21 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 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 25/26 26/27 2020/21 1.39 per place 167 first choices 120 places 2021/22 0.88 per place 175 first choices 198 places 2022/23 1.31 per place 314 first choices 240 places 2023/24 1.19 per place 280 first choices 235 places 2024/25 0.94 per place 232 first choices 246 places 2025/26 0.96 per place 233 first choices 243 places 2026/27 1.3 per place 305 first choices 234 places
First preferences per place at Bohunt Horsham. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 305 first preferences for 234 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bohunt Horsham, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2020/21 120 167 111 1.39
2021/22 198 175 175 0.88
2022/23 240 314 228 1.31
2023/24 235 280 226 1.19
2024/25 246 232 217 0.94
2025/26 243 233 222 0.96
2026/27 234 305 226 1.3

Places offered

234

in 2026/27

Named first choice

305

790 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

74.1%

226 of 305

Offers to families outside the council

3%

6 of 234 offers

How close you had to live

Bohunt Horsham filled its places in 2026, and 4,320m — 2.68 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

2.68 mi

4,320 metres, 2026

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.

West Sussex Council, allocation statistics for 2026. 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

1,620

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,124

69.4% of capacity

Unfilled places

496

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 Bohunt Horsham 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 Bohunt Horsham reported 496 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 69.4% 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, 2020/21 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Bohunt Horsham from 2020/21 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 850 1,700 places on roll 20/21 21/22 22/23 23/24 24/25 2020/21 1,620 places 240 on roll 2021/22 1,620 places 457 on roll 2022/23 1,620 places 730 on roll 2023/24 1,620 places 956 on roll 2024/25 1,620 places 1,124 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. Bohunt Horsham has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Bohunt Horsham. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
6 February 2026 Arrangements did not comply REF4595

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
Free schools
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
West Sussex

Postcode RH12 6AP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 147187).

Other contested secondary schools in West Sussex

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.