Choices? What choices?

LESS than two weeks before the 24 October deadline for Londoners to submit their preferences for secondary school places, a new row has broken out over first school choices.

With the looming recession adding to the scramble for top state places, admissions watchdog Sir Philip Hunter bluntly described the notion that all parents can get their first choice school as "a myth".

He warned that some parents would "always be disappointed", a view backed by Ed Balls's own senior admissions official.

The stark assessment followed a decade of Labour promises to give parents more choice over schools for their children. Sir Philip, chief schools adjudicator for England, said: "Whatever steps are taken to increase choice, there will always be disappointed applicants."

Derek Emmings, director of the fair access division of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, issued a similar note of caution. "There are no easy answers," Mr Emmings said. "There are always going to be cases where parents don't get exactly what they want."

Their comments came as thousands of London parents struggle to find places for their children next year amid record competition for the best schools. The credit crunch is being blamed as parents aim to save on school fees by trying to secure places at sought-after state grammars.

Last week it emerged that police had to be called to maintain order at Wallington County Grammar School in Sutton because so many parents turned up when their children took the entrance exam at the same time. The school received 1,500 applications for 126 places.

In his remarks to council officials, Sir Philip blamed successive governments for attempting to create a free market for schools that spawned a "chaotic" admissions system by the late 1990s. Ministers have claimed that free choice would see popular schools expand and unpopular ones improve or close.

But as our two case studies show, popular schools are not expanding and the increased demand for places is leaving more and more parents disappointed.

STATE - Laurie has about a one in
nine chance of a place at Tiffin'

Yet again this week I had to sit my 10-year-old son down to the depressing ritual of having to find the "next in sequence" in rows of random squiggles.

Straight out of bed but heart-breakingly resigned to his fate, he steadily ploughed through what amounted to yet another contorted exercise in mental gymnastics known as non-verbal reasoning.

Barely awake, Laurie had to deduce, for instance, that "the black and white arrow must next rotate 135 degrees, flip over to a mirror image, then swap with the shaded arrow and so the answer in this line has to be d'."

Getting the answer right may well decide his whole future — and more immediately whether he will achieve the holy grail of getting into Tiffin Boys, the Kingston grammar school rated as one of the best state boys' schools in the country for GCSEs and described by Ofsted as "outstanding" in every department.

The other best state schools have all been closed or jumped over into the private sector.

Consequently, such is Tiffin's popularity, Laurie has an estimated one in nine chance of getting a place and his chances rest entirely on his non-verbal and verbal reasoning scores in one test on one day.

The exam is known to be one of the most difficult in the country and is more stretching than many designed for children two or three years older. Some of its questions are GCSE-level or above.

So tonight, after school, when he should be playing football in the park with his mates, he will be working out what is to HNA if CXG is to DWH. The following day it will be maths, including some problems nasty enough to stump his 22-year-old cousin armed with an A-grade maths A-level. If Laurie completed all the extra homework he has been set, he would be spending the equivalent of at least another day a week at school. This is the most stressful year of his life to date, and inevitably one of the toughest of mine, too.

Yet I do not consider myself a demented, hot-housing mother. Before January this year I believed my history-mad, super-literate, fact-loving child would simply find his natural habitat in the local state school. But the options are still distressingly limited despite all the money that has been poured in.

Tiffin, which achieved 82.9 per cent A or A* grades at GCSE last year and sent 20 boys to Oxbridge, is almost unique in having five dedicated and specialist history teachers who are leaders in their field. Touring around our two local non-faith comprehensives this week drove home the point that rigorous history teaching is otherwise pretty hard to find in the state sector.

While both have much to admire, they are only
just emerging from troubled pasts and their priorities must necessarily be raising general standards rather than handling the quirky needs of a particularly academic boy.

The Government constantly bangs the parental choice drum — but in reality there is no choice at all. It would be nice to think we could find a rich benefactor to pay the £20,000 or so a year fees and other costs for a private school with a top-notch history department but that's not going to happen.

An email to Westminster School asking for its advice in our circumstances was not even graced with a response. Alternatively, we could send him to a state school specialising in history.

If only it were that easy. Nearby Holland Park is a local school with specialist status for English and history but has changed its admissions criteria to exclude children attending primaries outside the borough, in this case Kensington and Chelsea. Laurie's primary is just over the boundary in Hammersmith and Fulham so we have no chance. No other state schools in this part of London specialise in history.

The third option was putting Laurie through intensive tuition outside school for either a grammar school with a good history department or a private school that offers scholarships. We know both are long-shots particularly as competition hots up for the best free or subsidised educations in these credit-crunched times. But it's the best chance we have got.
We know that we are putting a much too heavy burden on Laurie's young shoulders. But we also know that he is a boy who will read an historical encyclopaedia from cover to cover for fun and it would be tragic for such enthusiasm to be killed off.

So in December Laurie, a bright but gentle dreamer, will sit the exam for Tiffin Boys in Kingston. He will be up against literally hundreds of the brightest boys in the whole of south and east London and beyond — one current pupil commutes up from Portsmouth.

No, that's not fair. Not fair on him, or the other boys and their parents desperate to find the right school for their bright young sons.

It's not fair on us either. But when the greatest city on earth cannot provide a good history education for its bright young things, what choice do we have but to put him in for it?
Mr Balls, are you listening?

PRIVATE - Ralph passed all four entrance exams but we didn't get a single offer. I cried'

Getting my eldest son Ralph into secondary school last year was one of the most stressful things I've ever had to do. Now what wakes us up in the middle of the night is not will he get in but how the hell we're going to pay for it.

My children were always going to go to the local state primary. I believe in community and the huge impact enthusiastic parents can have on a school. Naively, it wasn't until the end of year four that we realised our only secondary option was Sheen School, a failing and dilapidated institution.

We live near enough to the legendary grammar school Tiffin Boys for it to have been the perfect solution but let's not kid ourselves it's for your average child. They only test verbal and non-verbal reasoning — no comprehension or general knowledge — which means only a certain type of boy gets in: brilliant at patterns and logic, if somewhat blinkered. Children encouraged to have wide interests, like Ralph, didn't have a hope.

Nevertheless, still holding out for Tiffin, we visited. It was soul-destroying being one of 400 desperate parents, stuffed into hot corridors smelling of school-dinner fish, knowing that 1,170 boys last year went for 140 places. Ralph couldn't get out fast enough. That night we made the choice to sentence ourselves to private secondary education — 10 years of both parents working full-time, no foreign holidays, cheaper food and fewer nights out.

At that stage, I still believed that if you paid £12,000 a year, you got to choose your school. We registered with the ex-state grammars: Hampton as first choice, Kingston Grammar (KGS) and St James' and Latymer. We signed Ralph up with a tutor once a week and piled on the academic pressure.

Hampton and KGS both say they actively discourage tutoring but you can't risk not playing the system. You might know that your child is near the top of their year, plays every team sport going and is an all-round good egg but unless they can pass the exam, it's meaningless. These schools are now so difficult to get into they can demand elite sports players who can also accompany themselves on the trumpet.

More than 550 children took the exam for KGS for 75 places, 450 at Latymer and Hampton and fewer at St James'. Ralph passed all four exams and was invited to four interviews, which he thought had gone well. As offers day approached in February I felt sick. We didn't get one offer, only places on four waiting lists. I cried. After all we'd been through, we didn't even have a school for this boy who had done everything right. The same day, Richmond council allocated us to Sheen School.

Two more weeks of hell went by as people with multiple offers made up their minds. Eventually two places came up. Despite being in the top 50 per cent who passed the exam for Hampton and Latymer, he wasn't offered a place at either. We gladly accepted KGS.

From the outside this all looks like self-induced, mass hysteria. But if confidence in state secondaries gets worse, competition will get even tougher and people will give up on the good borough primaries and opt for the independent prep schools hoping it will up their chances for senior school.

Have we had time to celebrate Ralph's achievement? No, because we've taken on a financial burden that I know weighs heavy on my husband. And the whole scenario is about to start again for our youngest son. But this time it's even worse because our only chance of coping with two lots of fees is to push hard for a sports scholarship.

More than 10 years after Blair claimed "education, education, education" as a priority for New Labour, London's parents are struggling to navigate a system that has failed both them and their children.