School admissions: four-in-10 miss out in some areas

Figures obtained by The Daily Telegraph show just 60 per cent of 11-year-olds will get into their preferred school in parts of England this September.

Many children will be forced to take second, third or even sixth-choice schools when school admissions rulings are made on Tuesday.

Competition is expected to be most fierce in London and counties with academic selection where parents can choose between dozens of easily accessible schools.

Figures also show that many of the Government’s flagship academies are now among the most popular schools in England, with one attracting 11 applications for every place.

Hatcham College, an academy in south-east London, has received 1,757 applications for just 165 places this year, while 479 pupils are vying for 60 places at the popular King Solomon Academy in north-west London.

One education lawyer said parents were preparing appeals against secondary school allocations even before places had been offered.

Matt Richards, a senior partner at schoolappeals.com, a firm set up to help parents fight admissions rulings, said some families contacted them up to six months in advance amid fears children will miss out on their preferred secondary this week.

Last night, Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister, admitted there were “not enough good schools delivering the academic standards demanded by parents”.

But he insisted the Coalition was prioritising the teaching of academic subjects in schools, cracking down on bullying and bad behaviour and allowing teachers and parents to open their own “free schools” to meet demand for places in local areas.

“All these measures are designed to give parents more genuine choice of a good school and to reduce the anxiety of finding a secondary school place,” he said.

Some 540,000 children will find out which state secondary school they have got in to on Tuesday as part of “National Offer Day”.

Nationally, some one-in-six pupils missed out on their first choice secondary school last year.

Early figures published by some local authorities showed far more children will fail to secure their preferred place in 2011.

Only 60 per cent of pupils in the London borough of Westminster have been given places at their first choice school this year, compared with almost 68 per cent last year.

Numbers are as low as 61 per cent in Southend, 73 per cent in Sandwell, 74 per cent in London’s Tower Hamlets and 77 per cent in Warwickshire.

In Bradford, some 78.5 per cent of pupils gained places at their first choice secondary school while 83 per cent got into their preferred school in Manchester and Essex and 84 per cent in Kirklees and Solihull.

Figures show that academies –independent state schools run free of local council control – are now among the most popular secondaries in the countries.

According to data, the Ark Academy in Wembley, north-west London, received 987 applications this year – more than three times as much as 2010. It means more than five pupils are competing for every place. Some 11 pupils are applying for each desk at Hatcham College while eight are doing so at King Solomon Academy.

Under current admissions rules, parents can appeal to an independent panel if their children are rejected from state schools. They must prove that the school breached strict guidelines governing places to overturn allocations.

Mr Richards said schoolappeals.com had been contacted as early as October by parents seeking to build cases in anticipation of children being rejected.

"There's the people that absolutely know they're not going to get it because they've researched it," he said.

"You could be a Catholic but don't meet the practising Catholic criteria - you haven't been every Sunday or you've been just once a month - so you're not going to meet that. You know absolutely that, over the last three years, places have gone to people who meet that criteria, so you know you're going to have to appeal.

"Others have done their homework on distance grounds. They've gone to the local authority and said 'In the last three years what's the last person's distance that's got a place?' and they've said 'A mile'. They know that if they live 1.3 miles away it's a fair assumption that they're not going to get a place."