PARENTAL CHOICE: or the struggle to find a suitable secondary

ALL OVER London, parents are facing a trauma which is becoming an annual event. No, not the preparations for Christmas - it's the problem of finding a secondary school for their children.

If they have a child in his or her final year at primary school - Year 6 these parents face an agonising condition which sets in with the autumn and may easily stay with them deep into next year. They are struggling to secure their youngster's admission to a suitable secondary school; or, in far too many cases, just getting them into any secondary school, almost anywhere, that does not depress them, appal them or frighten them to death.

The polite description for this process is "parental choice" - a Tory invention which sounds very nice. But many of those in London presently striving to exercise it use very different terminology: a nightmare, a joke, chaos.

Manifestations of this madness are rich and varied. But the root of the problem is brutally plain: there are simply not enough schools of the type such parents prefer to satisfy demand.

Of course, some are lucky. They live close enough to a school they like for their child to be offered an automatic place. Others with the means and the inclination head for the independent sector without a second thought.

Meanwhile, there are those who just accept whatever their local education authority (LEA) offers them, perhaps because they are indifferent, but possibly because they lack the knowledge, the know- how or simply the low cunning to get something better.

But those who fall outside these categories are a substantial and growing minority. The desperate quests of such parents have become a shocking feature of modern London life.

An indication of their numbers can be gleaned from a report published last month (and already highlighted in the Standard) which found that nearly 60,000 children throughout the Greater London area - about 14 per cent of the entire secondary-school population - are already travelling beyond their LEA boundaries to schools which may lie three or more boroughs away from their homes.

Behind these stark statistics lie endless stories of consternation, determination, subtle strategy and outright deceit - and more are being added at this minute.

Many such tales begin at the open mornings and evenings held by nearly all secondary schools during the autumn term for the benefit of prospective pupils and their parents.

After a tour of the classrooms and, depending on your luck, a performance by the Year 9 string quartet, the head will make a speech.

If the school is popular this always contains a warning about admissions.

Among non-selective state schools the precise criteria vary, but preference is typically given to the siblings of pupils already at the school, with the remaining places allocated according to how near the school the applicant's home is. In many cases, families living as close as half a mile from a popular comprehensive find they are afflicted by a proximity deficit.

These concentrations of demand symbolise the squeeze on "parental choice", and are a major cause of the great treks across the capital that so many parents - usually mothers still undertake, offspring straggling in tow.

Rejecting other nearby schools sometimes perfectly good but rendered unattractive by comparison

with a more-vaunted neighbour - they've traced familiar train, Tube and bus routes for possible alternatives, picked the brains of friends, and pored over Ofsted reports on the Internet. You can be sure how they've been spending much of the weekend - picking through the details of the Government's latest performance tables, published last Thursday.

But choice is not just about travel and research. It's also about making complex calculations. Would success in an exam for some far- flung selective school be worth the preparation and the stress? And what about the pain of failure? Would sacrificing a summer holiday mean you could afford to pay fees?

As for those who eschew both selective and private schools, their "choice" is restricted to unearthing distant comprehensives which have a pleasant atmosphere and appear to be improving but don't yet look good on paper.

The whole crazy situation is crystallised when parents sit down with their child's primary school head teacher to fill in their "secondary transfer" form. The procedure can vary slightly from authority to authority, but the general principle is deceptively straightforward: the schools you've liked are written down, usually in order of preference.

But in boroughs where provision is unevenly distributed or standards vary widely, parents already know they will not be offered an automatic place at their favourite local school.

"Choice" is thus reduced to a few unattractive options. They may apply anyway and be put on a waiting list, but with no idea if they'll ever rise to the top of it.

In the meantime they may embark on the long and often painful process of appealing to a committee of independent adjudicators, with limited chances of success. For "choice" read "gamble".

The alternative is to give "first choice" status to a far less popular school which you don't greatly care for but which at least guarantees the offer of a place somewhere and avoids the risk of the borough allocating you something even worse. In this case, for "choice" read "farce".

For some parents, there are other, sometimes more exclusive, avenues in the state sector. But these too are becoming clogged with competition. While LEAs control admissions to "county" secondary schools, other types of schools, although run under the aegis of an LEA, may have their own admissions criteria.

For example, many church schools interview parents before deciding whether to offer a place.

Over the years, these interviews have become more exacting due to the increasing numbers of applicants attracted by the good reputations church schools often enjoy. The key appears to be proving the intensity of your piety. Hence, in the months and years approaching secondary transfer, we find Anglican families becoming ostentatiously more Anglican, and Catholics becoming more Catholic than the Pope.

There are ways of alleviating all this aggravation - some legitimate, others not.

Parents often obtain application forms for boroughs other than their home one and fill in a different "first choice" on each - one school for each borough - thereby increasing their chances of receiving an acceptable offer sometime in February. This seems to be a grey area in the system. So far as anyone can tell me, it doesn't qualify as sharp practice, though some heads of improving schools now feel popular enough to tell out-of-borough parents that they will check to see if you've made another first choice somewhere else, and reject your application if they find you have.

But where you live has now become the great deciding factor. The affluent and forward-planning move house well in advance (nowadays, a school's reputation and intake area is part of estate agents' basic knowledge). Others give false addresses and frequently get away with it. This, perhaps, is the cruellest consequence of the way "parental choice" helps the advantaged get by and the disadvantaged get whatever's left. Middleclass parents don't just have more money, they also have more of the social skills that can impress at an appeal, and will make the most plausible cheats and liars.

It all makes a bit of a mess of the Government's policy of opposing selection by examination. To many London parents it now appears as if there are several other kinds: selection by mortgage, selection by social class, selection by Godliness, selection by subterfuge. And with the secondary school population projected to increase by 50,000 in the next five years, things can only get worse.

'We have a feeling we'll

"WHERE we live is a black hole," says Dominique Laslett, "especially if your child is a girl." At first glance this seems surprising: the borough of Barnet, where the Lasletts and their daughter Roxane live, is often associated with high-quality London schools, both mixed and single sex.

Ted Laslett mentions three comprehensives in the borough he would be happy for Roxane to go to, but knows she is unlikely to be offered a place by any of them: Queen Elizabeth Girls, Copthall school for girls and The Compton School, a popular co-ed, are all heavily oversubscribed, and the family doesn't live close enough to any of them to qualify automatically. Looking elsewhere has included entering Roxane for the entrance exam of the Dame Alice Owens grammar school in Potters Bar. The selective route is "going totally against my principles, but in these circumstances, there is little other choice", says Mr Laslett.

The overall effect of Roxane's secondary transfer saga has left the Lasletts deeply pessimistic: "In the end we've a feeling we will get nothing at all" - nothing, that is, except a place in a Barnet school they don't want Roxane to go to. get nothing in the end' Dominique and Ted Laslett, Barnet

'The whole family seems to be punished'

Viviana and Lalo Woodruff, Westminster

"THE more we look," reflects Viviana Woodruff, "the more confused we become.

How do we decide which is the right school for our son Peter? How do we make the choice?"

Part of the problem for Ms Woodruff and her husband Lalo is simply in judging any school on the strength of a brief visit: "You go to these open evenings, and, of course, they put on a good show. But that doesn't tell you what the school is like the rest of the time." Then there are the dilemmas of admissions procedures.

"They tell you to go and get a feel for a school. But even if I get a good feeling I also get an existential sinking feeling because in most cases the school will choose the child and the parent rather than the other way round.

"For example, there is one local comprehensive that we liked and will apply to, but we won't find out if we live near enough until March. And what do we put for our second choice? Somewhere that nobody else wants just to make sure that we get something?" The uncertainty has encouraged the Woodruffs to look at selective schools further afield, but these bring other anxieties: "What if he doesn't pass the exam? What if he is off colour or nervous?"

Ms Woodruff offers a sharp summary of the general position in London: "We are told we have a choice, yet because the schools are of such unequal standards we feel we have no real choice at all. And the whole process has become so painful and convoluted. There may be no caning in schools nowadays, but they seem to have replaced it by punishing the whole family. The perversities seem to be never- ending. It's all completely absurd."

Pamela Hatton, Lambeth

'System is unfair'

PAMELA Hatton has followed an exhaustive - and exhausting - strategy in looking for a secondary school for her son Mark.

She has visited no fewer than 14 this year within a 10-mile radius of her home in Tulse Hill, from Wandsworth to Westminster, from Southwark to Sutton.

They include boys' schools and mixed schools, state schools and independent schools, inner-city comprehensives and suburban grammars.

Ms Hutton's determination has cost her time and money. Five of the schools she likes require Mark to take an entrance exam, and that has meant preparation with a private tutor. He might have entered more but for the fact that independent schools typically charge a fee of 40-50.

"I just want to give Mark every option I can," she explains. Yet in seeking to exercise "parental choice", Ms Hutton has become particularly conscious of its shortcomings. For example: "Not everyone has a fair chance of getting into some of these selective schools, because unless they find out well in advance they don't know what they need to do to pass the exams."

Furthermore, the possibility of a huge disappointment remains: "By mid-February all the results will be back, all the applications will have been sorted out and we'll know if he's got in anywhere - if not, we'll move to Brighton!"

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