Admissions chaos: 'I was in shock' says mother offered place seven miles away

When friends of Reise Berry-Campbell start secondary school today, the 11-year-old boy will not be joining them. His mother is planning to educate him at home because he was rejected by Deptford Green School, the south-east London comprehensive he set his heart on.

His local education authority, Lewisham, offered Reise a place at Malory School in Bromley instead. But his mother, Michelle, refused it, arguing that it was more than seven miles away and would require her son to make a long and difficult daily journey by bus and train.

She appealed against the rejection by Deptford Green, saying the family had just bought a house a few minutes' walk away and that her son should be allowed to go to his local school. The new home is also next door to Reise's grandmother, who looks after him three days a week. The appeal was turned down.

Mrs Berry-Campbell, a training manager at the Terrence Higgins Trust Aids charity, said: "Before we applied to Deptford Green we went to look around and Reise was so excited about it. We all thought he was going to get in. When I found out he hadn't, I was almost in shock. It was so unexpected."

She added: "My son's health has just deteriorated since he found out he had been rejected. He just withdrew into himself. He has asked me why he didn't get in but I don't know what to tell him. I don't understand it myself.

"He's now been referred to a child psychologist. I think the pressure that an 11-year-old child is put under in applying to secondary school is absolutely terrible. This is no way to run a school system."

Reise said: "I really want to go to Deptford Green because all my friends are going there and it's the closest school around. It would take me two minutes to walk there through the park opposite our house.

"I don't want to go to Malory because I don't know anyone there. I don't even know where that school is.

"It is a very unfair system. If some children get places and other children don't, then where do the other children go?" he said.