School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Ormiston Six Villages Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 20 families who named Ormiston Six Villages Academy as their first choice did not get a place: 140 put it first and 120 of them were offered one.

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

20

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

140 first preferences for 147 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Ormiston Six Villages Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Ormiston Six Villages Academy, 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

Ormiston Six Villages Academy turned first-choice families away in 4 of the last 12 years. It has never had more first choices than places, and refused families who named it first anyway — 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 Ormiston Six Villages Academy, 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 0.78 per place 102 first choices 131 places 2016/17 0.89 per place 77 first choices 87 places 2017/18 0.77 per place 53 first choices 69 places 2018/19 0.79 per place 95 first choices 120 places 2019/20 0.85 per place 126 first choices 149 places 2020/21 0.73 per place 96 first choices 132 places 2021/22 0.83 per place 124 first choices 150 places 2022/23 0.77 per place 116 first choices 150 places 2023/24 0.91 per place 136 first choices 150 places 2024/25 0.82 per place 121 first choices 147 places 2025/26 0.95 per place 139 first choices 147 places 2026/27 0.95 per place 140 first choices 147 places
First preferences per place at Ormiston Six Villages Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 140 first preferences for 147 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Ormiston Six Villages Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 131 102 102 0.78
2016/17 87 77 77 0.89
2017/18 69 53 53 0.77
2018/19 120 95 95 0.79
2019/20 149 126 126 0.85
2020/21 132 96 96 0.73
2021/22 150 124 124 0.83
2022/23 150 116 111 0.77
2023/24 150 136 119 0.91
2024/25 147 121 108 0.82
2025/26 147 139 121 0.95
2026/27 147 140 120 0.95

Places offered

147

in 2026/27

Named first choice

140

343 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

85.7%

120 of 140

Offers to families outside the council

0%

0 of 147 offers

How close you had to live

Ormiston Six Villages Academy filled its places in 2026, and 4,242m — 2.64 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 7 , which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

2.64 mi

4,242 metres, 2026

Under criterion

7

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

816

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

690

84.6% of capacity

Unfilled places

126

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 Ormiston Six Villages Academy 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 Ormiston Six Villages Academy reported 126 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 84.6% 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, 2013/14 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Ormiston Six Villages Academy from 2013/14 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 450 900 places on roll 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2013/14 816 places 661 on roll 2014/15 816 places 611 on roll 2015/16 816 places 587 on roll 2016/17 816 places 542 on roll 2017/18 816 places 478 on roll 2018/19 816 places 472 on roll 2020/21 816 places 540 on roll 2021/22 816 places 601 on roll 2022/23 816 places 640 on roll 2023/24 816 places 687 on roll 2024/25 816 places 690 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 PO20 3UE. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 140199).

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.