School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Shoreham Academy?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 34 families who named Shoreham Academy as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 325 and 350 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.

1.08

first choices for every place available

350 first preferences for 325 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Shoreham Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for Shoreham 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

Shoreham Academy 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 Shoreham 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 1.04 per place 282 first choices 270 places 2016/17 1.01 per place 290 first choices 287 places 2017/18 1.19 per place 344 first choices 289 places 2018/19 1.06 per place 316 first choices 298 places 2019/20 1.21 per place 361 first choices 298 places 2020/21 1.17 per place 345 first choices 295 places 2021/22 1.18 per place 343 first choices 291 places 2022/23 1.26 per place 377 first choices 300 places 2023/24 1.09 per place 344 first choices 316 places 2024/25 1.25 per place 350 first choices 280 places 2025/26 1.06 per place 311 first choices 294 places 2026/27 1.08 per place 350 first choices 325 places
First preferences per place at Shoreham Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 350 first preferences for 325 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Shoreham Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 270 282 258 1.04
2016/17 287 290 280 1.01
2017/18 289 344 284 1.19
2018/19 298 316 297 1.06
2019/20 298 361 290 1.21
2020/21 295 345 286 1.17
2021/22 291 343 285 1.18
2022/23 300 377 300 1.26
2023/24 316 344 292 1.09
2024/25 280 350 280 1.25
2025/26 294 311 287 1.06
2026/27 325 350 316 1.08

Places offered

325

in 2026/27

Named first choice

350

624 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

90.3%

316 of 350

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 325 offers

How close you had to live

Shoreham Academy filled its places in 2026, and 2,562m — 1.59 miles — is how far away the last child to be offered a place lived. They were admitted under criterion 5 , which is numbered in the school's own admission arrangements for that year.

Last place offered at

1.59 mi

2,562 metres, 2026

Under criterion

5

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

1,500

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,507

100.5% of capacity

Over its capacity by

7

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

200

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 Shoreham 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 Shoreham Academy 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Shoreham Academy from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 900 1,800 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,600 places 1,360 on roll 2010/11 1,600 places 1,373 on roll 2011/12 1,644 places 1,412 on roll 2012/13 1,644 places 1,428 on roll 2013/14 1,650 places 1,503 on roll 2014/15 1,650 places 1,549 on roll 2015/16 1,650 places 1,568 on roll 2016/17 1,650 places 1,584 on roll 2017/18 1,650 places 1,606 on roll 2018/19 1,650 places 1,688 on roll 2020/21 1,700 places 1,789 on roll 2021/22 1,700 places 1,764 on roll 2022/23 1,700 places 1,733 on roll 2023/24 1,700 places 1,751 on roll 2024/25 1,700 places 1,769 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. Shoreham Academy has been the subject of one such determination. The adjudicator did not find its arrangements at fault.

Adjudicator determinations naming Shoreham Academy. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
4 May 2020 No fault found ADA3640

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
Academy sponsor led
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
West Sussex

Postcode BN43 6YT. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 135962).

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.