School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Hazelwick School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 127 families who named Hazelwick School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 290 and 405 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.

1.40

first choices for every place available

405 first preferences for 290 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Hazelwick School

There is no published appeal success rate for Hazelwick 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

Hazelwick School turned first-choice families away in every one of the 12 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Hazelwick 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 1.03 per place 310 first choices 300 places 2016/17 1.04 per place 312 first choices 300 places 2017/18 1.01 per place 301 first choices 297 places 2018/19 1.12 per place 332 first choices 296 places 2019/20 1.28 per place 383 first choices 299 places 2020/21 1.28 per place 382 first choices 298 places 2021/22 1.46 per place 433 first choices 296 places 2022/23 1.32 per place 394 first choices 299 places 2023/24 1.39 per place 448 first choices 323 places 2024/25 1.32 per place 387 first choices 294 places 2025/26 1.53 per place 467 first choices 306 places 2026/27 1.4 per place 405 first choices 290 places
First preferences per place at Hazelwick School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 405 first preferences for 290 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Hazelwick School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 300 310 271 1.03
2016/17 300 312 285 1.04
2017/18 297 301 262 1.01
2018/19 296 332 262 1.12
2019/20 299 383 278 1.28
2020/21 298 382 277 1.28
2021/22 296 433 282 1.46
2022/23 299 394 279 1.32
2023/24 323 448 305 1.39
2024/25 294 387 273 1.32
2025/26 306 467 285 1.53
2026/27 290 405 278 1.4

Places offered

290

in 2026/27

Named first choice

405

1,026 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

68.6%

278 of 405

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 290 offers

How close you had to live

Hazelwick School filled its places in 2026, and 1,362m — 0.85 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

0.85 mi

1,362 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.

How places were ranked

These are the oversubscription criteria Hazelwick School published for 2026 entry, in the order the school itself sets them out. They are the rules the admission authority had to apply when more families applied than there were places — and at the first stage of an appeal, they are the document the panel is looking at.

Oversubscription criteria for Hazelwick School, 2026 entry, quoted from the school's determined admission arrangements. Sub-clauses are shown indented under the criterion they qualify.
Rank Criterion, as the school words it
1 A 'looked after child' or a child who was previously looked after but immediately after being looked after became subject to an Adoption Order, Residence Order, Child Arrangement Order or Special Guardianship Order. A looked after child is a child who is (a) in the care of a local authority, or (b) being provided with accommodation by a local authority in the exercise of their social services functions (see the definition in Section 22(1) of the Children Act 1989).
2 Children who need a place at the school on exceptional and compelling social, psychological or medical grounds. These applications will require a letter from a qualified person supporting the exceptional reasons, e.g. Doctor, Social Worker.
3 Children whose parent/step parent/adoptive parent/carer is employed by Hazelwick School at the time of application for a school place.
4 Children who live within the catchment area with siblings already at the school who will still be attending in Years 7 – 11 when they start. Siblings refer to brother or sister, half brother or sister, adopted brother or sister, step-brother or sister, or the child of the parent's or carer's partner and, in every case, living in the same family unit at the same address. Three Bridges, Crawley, West Sussex RH10 1SX • tel: 01293 403344 5. Other children who live in the catchment area.
5 Children who live outside the catchment area with siblings already attending the school, who will still be attending in Years 7 – 11 when they start. (See point 3 above for the definition of 'siblings'.)
6 Other children who live outside the catchment area. In the case of oversubscription in any of the above categories, priority of placement is given to applicants who live nearest the school, measured by a straight line from the school to the child's home address using Ordnance Survey address point data from a central point in each building. Parents/carers who are unsuccessful in their application for a place for their child at the school are entitled to appeal against the decision to an independent appeal panel. Details of the procedure are available from the local authority, which will support the school’s management of the appeals process. […] criterion continues in the source document

The first criterion is not the school's choice. Paragraph 1.7 of the School Admissions Code 2021 requires every admission authority in England to give looked-after and previously looked-after children the highest priority, so it sits at the top of every list of this kind.

Meeting a criterion is not the same as winning an appeal

A panel does not decide your appeal by working through this list again. At the first stage it asks a narrower question: were these arrangements lawful, and were they applied to your application correctly and impartially? If they were, the panel moves to the second stage and weighs your child's circumstances against the harm to the school of admitting another pupil — and that stage has nothing to do with which criterion you fell under.

So this list is most useful for checking one thing: whether the school applied its own published rules to you properly. A criterion applied to you in a way the wording does not support is a first-stage point. Simply falling into a lower category is not — that is the system working as published.

These are the criteria determined for 2026 entry. An admission authority must re-determine its arrangements by 15 March each year, so check the school's current version before relying on any of this for a different round.

Hazelwick School's determined admission arrangements for 2026 entry, published by the admission authority under paragraph 1.47 of the School Admissions Code 2021. Source document. Quoted verbatim; wording, order and numbering are the school's own.

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

1,488

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,524

102.4% of capacity

Over its capacity by

36

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 Hazelwick 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 Hazelwick 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, 2011/12 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Hazelwick School from 2011/12 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 950 1,900 places on roll 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2011/12 1,834 places 1,819 on roll 2012/13 1,838 places 1,838 on roll 2013/14 1,838 places 1,790 on roll 2014/15 1,838 places 1,820 on roll 2015/16 1,838 places 1,856 on roll 2016/17 1,838 places 1,821 on roll 2017/18 1,838 places 1,792 on roll 2018/19 1,838 places 1,799 on roll 2020/21 1,838 places 1,841 on roll 2021/22 1,838 places 1,867 on roll 2022/23 1,838 places 1,873 on roll 2023/24 1,838 places 1,879 on roll 2024/25 1,838 places 1,886 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
West Sussex

Postcode RH10 1SX. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 137263).

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.