School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Chichester Free School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 26 families who named Chichester Free School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 67 and 80 put it first.

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

1.19

first choices for every place available

80 first preferences for 67 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Chichester Free School

There is no published appeal success rate for Chichester Free 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 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

Chichester Free School turned first-choice families away in 10 of the last 12 years. More families named it first than it had places in 8 of those years. In the other 2 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 Chichester Free 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 1.2 per place 145 first choices 121 places 2016/17 0.97 per place 117 first choices 120 places 2017/18 1.07 per place 101 first choices 94 places 2018/19 1.21 per place 114 first choices 94 places 2019/20 1.25 per place 84 first choices 67 places 2020/21 1 per place 65 first choices 65 places 2021/22 0.72 per place 43 first choices 60 places 2022/23 0.96 per place 67 first choices 70 places 2023/24 1.43 per place 97 first choices 68 places 2024/25 1.45 per place 97 first choices 67 places 2025/26 1.04 per place 102 first choices 98 places 2026/27 1.19 per place 80 first choices 67 places
First preferences per place at Chichester Free School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 80 first preferences for 67 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Chichester Free School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 121 145 100 1.2
2016/17 120 117 116 0.97
2017/18 94 101 85 1.07
2018/19 94 114 85 1.21
2019/20 67 84 48 1.25
2020/21 65 65 40 1
2021/22 60 43 39 0.72
2022/23 70 67 51 0.96
2023/24 68 97 54 1.43
2024/25 67 97 53 1.45
2025/26 98 102 79 1.04
2026/27 67 80 54 1.19

Places offered

67

in 2026/27

Named first choice

80

476 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

67.5%

54 of 80

Offers to families outside the council

1%

1 of 67 offers

How close you had to live

Every applicant was offered a place at Chichester Free School 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

1,020

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,084

106.3% of capacity

Over its capacity by

64

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

240

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 Chichester Free 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 Chichester Free 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 Chichester Free 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 1,260 places 206 on roll 2014/15 1,260 places 360 on roll 2015/16 1,260 places 571 on roll 2016/17 1,260 places 776 on roll 2017/18 1,260 places 883 on roll 2018/19 1,260 places 991 on roll 2020/21 1,260 places 1,012 on roll 2021/22 1,260 places 1,026 on roll 2022/23 1,260 places 1,024 on roll 2023/24 1,260 places 1,065 on roll 2024/25 1,260 places 1,084 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. Chichester Free School has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code.

Adjudicator determinations naming Chichester Free School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
25 July 2024 Arrangements did not comply ADA4298

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 PO20 1NP. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 139668).

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.