Less Than 50% of Children Got Their First Choice Secondary School
The competition for places in state secondary schools has been greater than ever this year with many families not considering a private education because of the recession. Add to this the press reports about the rising percentage of children not getting their first choice of place and it is understandable why so many families had a restless night.
Wandsworth has less than 50% of children getting their first choice - thought to be the lowest in London. A spokesman for the Council said:
" The borough is the victim of its own success because it runs good schools with some of the best exam results in south London. This means they are hugely in demand from parents not just in Wandsworth but also in neighbouring boroughs like Lambeth.
This led to a four per cent increase in the total number of applications this year, which put extra pressure on the system. Happily though 85 per cent of parents have an offer from one of their top three first three choices, which is in line with the rest of London.
Two of the borough's best schools were also massively oversubscribed this year. Forty per cent of all first preferences were for these two schools, meaning that 800 sets of parents were chasing 460 places.
In addition just under 30 per cent of all our first preferences were from non-Wandsworth parents. Some of these choices were clearly unlikely to succeed but will still count in our statistics."
As if the wait for news on a secondary school place wasn’t fraught enough, parents of Year 6 children had the additional angst of not being able to access the e-admissions website for several hours yesterday (Tuesday 2nd March).
The website used in the Pan London admissions system was unavailable for more than seven hours this morning affecting around 34,000 applicants for Year 7 places who had registered online.
Families who opted for the traditional paper of applying were also left frustrated as thousands of letters were not delivered.
A statement on the website read, "We apologise for the disruption to the eadmissions site caused by an overarching network issue un-related to the eadmissions site itself. The system is now working correctly and applicants should also be receiving emails with their outcomes."
March 5, 2010
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