SIR – The secondary school admission system is indeed chaotic (T&A, March 17), but this is largely of the authority’s own making.
After all, they must know how many children, from where, will need such schools many years in advance, so it’s hardly a surprise.
The real problem comes from the myth of ‘parental choice’. It is impossible to satisfy parental choice with such a wide disparity in the perceived qualities of different schools, yet attempting to accommodate that choice actually aggravates the disparity, rather than resolves it.
Add to this the trendy nonsense of ‘specialist sports/business/drama schools’ and the problem just gets worse.
The solution is to abandon this fog of implied choice and simply allocate each pupil to his/her nearest school with an available place.
Only then would any genuine issues of different service quality be evident, and it then becomes the single challenge for the education authority to elevate any lower-achievement schools to the higher standards of those above.
As well as levelling the educational field, imagine the impact this approach would have on the environment and conges-tion, by instantly eliminating all that unnecessary school-run traffic which we all currently suffer every day in term-time.
Graham Hoyle, Kirkbourne Grove, Baildon
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