The School Record

Published admissions and inspection figures for schools in England, from the DfE, Ofsted and local authorities.

The Appleton School

URN 136579 · Secondary · Academy converter · Essex

Croft Road, Benfleet, SS7 5RN

How many families applied

Preferences expressed and offers made at Year 7, as published by the Department for Education. These describe demand. They do not indicate whether any particular child would be offered a place.

In the 2025 intake, 218 families named The Appleton School as their first preference, and the school made 296 offers.

That is 0.74 first preferences per place offered, which places it above 19% of schools admitting at Year 7 in England that year.

More first preferences per place than 19% of comparable schools position among schools in England admitting at Year 7, 2025 intake

Fewer families are naming it first. Across the 5 most recent years held, first preferences per place averaged 1.02 in 2021–2022 and 0.77 in 2024–2025.

Applications and offers at Year 7, 12 intake years
Intake 1st preferences All preferences Offers made 1st prefs per place
2025 218 773 296 0.74
2024 216 756 270 0.80
2023 275 768 268 1.03
2022 300 763 300 1.00
2021 311 834 300 1.04
2020 292 834 293 1.00
2019 335 933 268 1.25
2018 289 877 263 1.10
2017 370 900 297 1.25
2016 303 819 266 1.14
2015 290 796 266 1.09
2014 230 752 261 0.88

“Offers made” counts the offers the school made. It is not the number of places the school had, so please do not read it as one.

Ofsted

Ofsted changed its inspection framework: the current one publishes several graded areas and no single overall grade, while the previous one published an overall effectiveness grade. Each inspection below states which framework produced it.

Ofsted ungraded inspection, 20 November 2024

Standards maintained

Ofsted's report for this school

Exam results

Published by the Department for Education for the whole year group. Figures for smaller cohorts are withheld by DfE to protect pupil privacy and appear here as a dash, not a zero.

Key stage 4 (GCSE)
YearAttainment 8Progress 8 Grade 4+ English & mathsEBacc grade 4+
2024/25 39.60 - 57.7% 21.3%
2023/24 41.90 -0.63
likely between -0.81 and -0.46		 65.7% 27.2%
2022/23 47.00 -0.28
likely between -0.45 and -0.11		 71.2% 29.2%

Progress 8 compares pupils here with pupils nationally who had similar results at the end of primary school; 0 is average. It is an estimate, and DfE publishes a range it is likely to fall within. Where that range spans zero, the school cannot be said to be above or below average.

Teachers staying and leaving

These come from the School Workforce Census, which follows each teacher into the next year. The numbers count full-time jobs, so a teacher who works half the week counts as half. They are not a count of people.

Census yearTeachers (FTE) Still there a year later Moved to another state school Left state schools Left in total
2024/25 82.6 70.2 7.0 5.4 15.0%
2023/24 79.8 63.4 8.0 8.4 20.6%
2022/23 88.0 63.4 14.6 10.0 28.0%
2021/22 86.0 71.0 4.6 10.4 17.4%
2020/21 88.5 74.5 7.3 6.7 15.8%
2019/20 88.5 82.7 2.0 3.8 6.6%

This is turnover among teachers. It says nothing about the headteacher or the senior leadership team: DfE publishes leadership retention separately and we do not hold it by school.

Catchment area

Nobody publishes a catchment area map for this school that we can read. That does not mean an address is outside its area. It means we hold no map, so we cannot tell you either way.

Where it is

The 6 nearest secondary schools we hold figures for, by straight-line distance from The Appleton School.

Nearby and related

Where these figures come from

This page was made on 9 September 2026. "Retrieved" means the day we downloaded the data. It is not the day the data was written, so the figures can be about an earlier year. How we compare schools.