School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Sir Robert Woodard Academy?

In 2026/27, The Sir Robert Woodard Academy offered 242 places and 224 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.

0.93

first choices for every place available

224 first preferences for 242 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Sir Robert Woodard Academy

There is no published appeal success rate for The Sir Robert Woodard 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

The Sir Robert Woodard Academy turned first-choice families away in 2 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 The Sir Robert Woodard 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 0.83 per place 170 first choices 204 places 2016/17 0.92 per place 151 first choices 164 places 2017/18 0.79 per place 153 first choices 193 places 2018/19 0.86 per place 146 first choices 170 places 2019/20 0.76 per place 239 first choices 315 places 2020/21 0.74 per place 219 first choices 296 places 2021/22 0.85 per place 238 first choices 281 places 2022/23 0.85 per place 266 first choices 314 places 2023/24 1.15 per place 270 first choices 234 places 2024/25 0.89 per place 253 first choices 285 places 2025/26 1.06 per place 243 first choices 229 places 2026/27 0.93 per place 224 first choices 242 places
First preferences per place at The Sir Robert Woodard Academy. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 224 first preferences for 242 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Sir Robert Woodard Academy, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 204 170 170 0.83
2016/17 164 151 151 0.92
2017/18 193 153 153 0.79
2018/19 170 146 146 0.86
2019/20 315 239 239 0.76
2020/21 296 219 219 0.74
2021/22 281 238 238 0.85
2022/23 314 266 266 0.85
2023/24 234 270 225 1.15
2024/25 285 253 253 0.89
2025/26 229 243 222 1.06
2026/27 242 224 224 0.93

Places offered

242

in 2026/27

Named first choice

224

447 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

100%

224 of 224

Offers to families outside the council

0%

1 of 236 offers

How close you had to live

Every applicant was offered a place at The Sir Robert Woodard Academy 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

1,200

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,295

107.9% of capacity

Over its capacity by

95

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 The Sir Robert Woodard 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 The Sir Robert Woodard 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 The Sir Robert Woodard Academy from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 700 1,400 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,400 places 1,128 on roll 2010/11 1,400 places 1,134 on roll 2011/12 1,338 places 1,099 on roll 2012/13 1,400 places 1,046 on roll 2013/14 1,400 places 1,022 on roll 2014/15 1,400 places 983 on roll 2015/16 1,400 places 990 on roll 2016/17 1,400 places 978 on roll 2017/18 1,400 places 978 on roll 2018/19 1,400 places 964 on roll 2020/21 1,400 places 1,165 on roll 2021/22 1,400 places 1,266 on roll 2022/23 1,400 places 1,361 on roll 2023/24 1,400 places 1,368 on roll 2024/25 1,400 places 1,400 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
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
West Sussex

Postcode BN15 9QZ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 135744).

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.