1 in 5 loses in the great school places lottery

Parents will inevitably feel disappointment when their children fail to secure a place at the secondary school of their choice, the Schools Secretary Ed Balls said yesterday – and he pledged to increase the number of places available at good schools.

He spoke yesterday morning as between 550,000 and 600,000 children discovered if they had made it into their first preference for secondary education.

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The results were announced as part of the first National Offer Day, with letters having been sent out by some local authorities on Saturday, and emails from other authorities sent yesterday.

"The good news is that the majority of children and parents get into their first-choice school, but if you don't get into your first choice, it is always going to feel unfair today," Mr Balls told GMTV.

"I want to make sure that ... in every area there is a choice of good schools. It is not enough to have a good local school in every community. There has got to be more than one so that if you don't get into your first choice, there are other options."

Last year, 82 per cent of children got into their first-choice schools and 94 per cent were enrolled in one of their top-three preferences. But, with competition for places reaching record levels this year, thousands of anxious parents fear a lottery for school places.

Lotteries are being used by oversubscribed schools in around 25 local authorities. They were designed to stop middle-class parents achieving advantage by buying or renting houses near the best schools.

Over the weekend, Mr Balls said he was setting up an inquiry into the role played by lotteries, arguing that "in some areas, this is the fairest way of resolving a tiny minority of decisions".

He said: "I have sympathy with the view that a lottery system can feel random and hard to explain to children in years five and six who don't know which children in their class they're going to secondary school with."

Yesterday he added: "In the very last resort to use a lottery may be the only way to do it. I think for most parents it feels really arbitrary ... so there must be better ways to do it."

Early indications suggest that more than one-third of local authorities have seen a rise in the number of applications, as the recession forces parents to abandon fee-paying schools.

Competition for places is fiercest in London and those areas that have grammar schools. This year, 62 per cent of parents in the west London borough of Richmond upon Thames got their children into first-choice schools, down from 64 per cent last year. The east London borough of Tower Hamlets was the second-worst offender across England, with only 72.1 per cent of children achieving a place at their first preference.

David Laws, Liberal Democrat spokesman on education, said: "The admissions process is so complex that children whose parents are not as well-informed are losing out. Ministers should remove the back-door power of selection from specialist and foundation schools and concentrate on making every school an excellent school."

Blackpool boy wins Eton scholarship

A working-class boy from Blackpool has won a £150,000 scholarship at Eton College after his father read a newspaper column by the headmaster looking for applications from state school children. Bradley Mitchell, 13, who had been identified as gifted at Highfield Humanities College, came across Eton in Ian Fleming's James Bond books. His father, Carl, read a column in which Eton's head, Tony Little, explained his plans to raise £50m for scholarships. "It caught my attention because Bradley is really bright," Mr Mitchell, who looks after troubled teenagers for a living, told The Sun. "But my wife, Diane, and I thought Eton was just a posh sixth-form college which fed Oxford and Cambridge." After visiting Eton, Bradley said: "I thought everyone was going to be posh, but all the teachers and boys seem nice and grounded."