School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Bulmershe School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 16 families who named The Bulmershe School as their first choice did not get a place: 206 put it first and 190 of them were offered one.

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

16

first-choice families refused a place in 2026/27

206 first preferences for 233 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Bulmershe School

There is no published appeal success rate for The Bulmershe 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 Wokingham 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 Wokingham, 7.9% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 16 of 202 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 Wokingham.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Wokingham 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 Bulmershe School turned first-choice families away in 7 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 The Bulmershe 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 0.66 per place 93 first choices 141 places 2016/17 0.76 per place 161 first choices 211 places 2017/18 0.76 per place 179 first choices 235 places 2018/19 0.93 per place 217 first choices 234 places 2019/20 0.93 per place 215 first choices 232 places 2020/21 0.88 per place 207 first choices 236 places 2021/22 0.97 per place 231 first choices 239 places 2022/23 0.98 per place 232 first choices 236 places 2023/24 0.84 per place 212 first choices 251 places 2024/25 0.99 per place 245 first choices 248 places 2025/26 0.81 per place 201 first choices 248 places 2026/27 0.88 per place 206 first choices 233 places
First preferences per place at The Bulmershe School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 206 first preferences for 233 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Bulmershe School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 141 93 93 0.66
2016/17 211 161 161 0.76
2017/18 235 179 176 0.76
2018/19 234 217 186 0.93
2019/20 232 215 181 0.93
2020/21 236 207 184 0.88
2021/22 239 231 176 0.97
2022/23 236 232 150 0.98
2023/24 251 212 165 0.84
2024/25 248 245 183 0.99
2025/26 248 201 185 0.81
2026/27 233 206 190 0.88

Places offered

233

in 2026/27

Named first choice

206

662 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

92.2%

190 of 206

Offers to families outside the council

33%

76 of 233 offers

This school was issued a new Department for Education reference when it converted to an academy. Its earlier years are included above, reported at the time under reference 110062.

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

1,250

104.2% of capacity

Over its capacity by

50

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

312

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 Bulmershe 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 The Bulmershe 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, 2009/10 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at The Bulmershe School from 2009/10 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 800 1,600 places on roll 09/10 11/12 13/14 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2009/10 1,383 places 1,101 on roll 2010/11 1,383 places 1,074 on roll 2011/12 1,383 places 1,023 on roll 2012/13 1,383 places 956 on roll 2013/14 1,383 places 898 on roll 2014/15 1,383 places 931 on roll 2015/16 1,383 places 918 on roll 2016/17 1,383 places 964 on roll 2017/18 1,383 places 1,050 on roll 2018/19 1,383 places 1,153 on roll 2020/21 1,512 places 1,333 on roll 2021/22 1,512 places 1,386 on roll 2022/23 1,512 places 1,433 on roll 2023/24 1,512 places 1,475 on roll 2024/25 1,512 places 1,502 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
Wokingham

Postcode RG5 3EU. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 149611).

Other contested secondary schools in Wokingham

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.