School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Bohunt School Worthing?

In 2026/27, Bohunt School Worthing offered 161 places and 132 families named it as their first choice.

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

0.82

first choices for every place available

132 first preferences for 161 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Bohunt School Worthing

There is no published appeal success rate for Bohunt School Worthing, 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 School Worthing turned first-choice families away in 7 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 Bohunt School Worthing, 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 0.86 per place 84 first choices 98 places 2016/17 0.92 per place 171 first choices 186 places 2017/18 1.21 per place 218 first choices 180 places 2018/19 1.08 per place 195 first choices 180 places 2019/20 1.1 per place 198 first choices 180 places 2020/21 1.28 per place 227 first choices 178 places 2021/22 1.06 per place 190 first choices 179 places 2022/23 1.07 per place 190 first choices 177 places 2023/24 0.97 per place 169 first choices 175 places 2024/25 0.93 per place 158 first choices 170 places 2025/26 1.03 per place 183 first choices 178 places 2026/27 0.82 per place 132 first choices 161 places
First preferences per place at Bohunt School Worthing. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 132 first preferences for 161 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Bohunt School Worthing, 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 98 84 84 0.86
2016/17 186 171 168 0.92
2017/18 180 218 176 1.21
2018/19 180 195 163 1.08
2019/20 180 198 126 1.1
2020/21 178 227 172 1.28
2021/22 179 190 164 1.06
2022/23 177 190 157 1.07
2023/24 175 169 159 0.97
2024/25 170 158 146 0.93
2025/26 178 183 171 1.03
2026/27 161 132 132 0.82

Places offered

161

in 2026/27

Named first choice

132

583 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

132 of 132

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 146 offers

How close you had to live

Every applicant was offered a place at Bohunt School Worthing in 2026. That is the most recent round West Sussex has published, and it means there was no cut-off that year — nobody was turned away for living too far, so no distance exists to be measured against.

Last place offered at

No cut-off

everyone who applied was offered, 2026

This is not a line you passed or failed

A panel cannot refuse your appeal because of how far from the school you live, and cannot allow it because you live close by. No cut-off applied here in any round West Sussex has published — the school offered a place to everyone who asked for one. 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.

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

900

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

898

99.8% of capacity

Unfilled places

2

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 School Worthing 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 School Worthing reported 2 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 99.8% 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, 2015/16 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Bohunt School Worthing from 2015/16 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 500 1,000 places on roll 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2015/16 900 places 208 on roll 2016/17 900 places 400 on roll 2017/18 900 places 576 on roll 2018/19 900 places 743 on roll 2020/21 900 places 893 on roll 2021/22 900 places 907 on roll 2022/23 900 places 918 on roll 2023/24 900 places 905 on roll 2024/25 900 places 898 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 sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
No religious character
Entry point
Year 7
Council
West Sussex

Postcode BN14 8AH. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140424).

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.