Annual rant.

I know I bang on about this every year, but it's something I find totally unacceptable and exasperating. Official figures this year suggest that around 20% - that's 1 in 5 folks - of children will not get a place at the secondary school of their (or their parents') first choice. This year, things have been made even more uncertain by the use by some schools (and approved by Government) of a lottery system to decide who gets in and who doesn't. A Schools Minister was on the box yesterday, supporting such a system, saying that it gave everybody the same chance of getting into a good school. Of course, what he didn't say was that it equally gave everybody the same chance of failing to get into a good school. The answer, as I have said before, is for LEAs to work out well in advance what the likely demand will be for places at their schools, and to make sure that the appropriate resources are in place to meet that demand. It's so bloody obvious, isn't it?