School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at The Piggott School?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 42 families who named The Piggott School as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 220 and 246 put it first.

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

1.12

first choices for every place available

246 first preferences for 220 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at The Piggott School

There is no published appeal success rate for The Piggott 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 Piggott School turned first-choice families away in 11 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 Piggott 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 1.02 per place 207 first choices 202 places 2016/17 1.15 per place 228 first choices 199 places 2017/18 1.29 per place 256 first choices 199 places 2018/19 1.27 per place 258 first choices 203 places 2019/20 1.38 per place 280 first choices 203 places 2020/21 1.44 per place 246 first choices 171 places 2021/22 1.48 per place 248 first choices 168 places 2022/23 1.01 per place 223 first choices 220 places 2023/24 1.17 per place 261 first choices 223 places 2024/25 1.19 per place 258 first choices 217 places 2025/26 0.95 per place 207 first choices 218 places 2026/27 1.12 per place 246 first choices 220 places
First preferences per place at The Piggott School. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 246 first preferences for 220 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at The Piggott School, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2015/16 202 207 185 1.02
2016/17 199 228 188 1.15
2017/18 199 256 191 1.29
2018/19 203 258 193 1.27
2019/20 203 280 198 1.38
2020/21 171 246 168 1.44
2021/22 168 248 158 1.48
2022/23 220 223 200 1.01
2023/24 223 261 209 1.17
2024/25 217 258 207 1.19
2025/26 218 207 194 0.95
2026/27 220 246 204 1.12

Places offered

220

in 2026/27

Named first choice

246

514 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

82.9%

204 of 246

Offers to families outside the council

5%

10 of 220 offers

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

1,315

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

1,381

105% of capacity

Over its capacity by

66

reported as full or beyond

Sixth form places

322

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 Piggott 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 Piggott 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 The Piggott 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 1,080 places 1,237 on roll 2012/13 1,338 places 1,220 on roll 2013/14 1,548 places 1,237 on roll 2014/15 1,548 places 1,255 on roll 2015/16 1,548 places 1,335 on roll 2016/17 1,548 places 1,385 on roll 2017/18 1,548 places 1,429 on roll 2018/19 1,548 places 1,496 on roll 2020/21 1,520 places 1,642 on roll 2021/22 1,692 places 1,753 on roll 2022/23 1,637 places 1,826 on roll 2023/24 1,637 places 1,854 on roll 2024/25 1,637 places 1,879 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. The Piggott School has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in one of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming The Piggott School. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
11 August 2020 Arrangements did not comply ADA3691
15 July 2011 No fault found ADA/2184

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 converter
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Wokingham

Postcode RG10 8DS. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 136891).

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.