Sue Fieldman: We have hard lessons to learn about reality of school choice

Now wake up to reality. For many parents who are in the throes of completing, or have just completed their application forms, school choice is a mere figment of government imagination. According to a poll carried out on Monday by parenting website Netmums, six in 10 parents say they found it, or are finding it stressful not knowing if their youngster will get a place at their preferred school.

And it is no wonder parents are stressed. Recent figures from the Department for Education revealed that one in five primaries, and more than a quarter of secondary schools in England, are either full or officially overcrowded. Pupils are already camping out in mobile classrooms and sitting cheek to jowl in lessons where there is scarcely room to breathe.

At The Good Schools Guide, we run an advice service for parents looking for schools for their children. We spend hours researching the best schools for their child's particular needs. Yes, we can tell them where their child will thrive, but are there places? That is the crucial question.

Everyone knows that the best schools are always the most difficult to get into. There are too many parents applying for too few places.

The nearer you get to the big towns; a coveted place at a good school is like gold dust. Some areas with grammar schools put up even higher hurdles for children to jump.

Now your child has to be super bright as well, which often means they have to be tutored up to the eyeballs after school – you have to spend extra money to get them a good free education. Is that fair? So we all look around for someone to blame. The easy targets are the increasing number of immigrants and, of course, those softly spoken southerners moving up from London. Yes, immigration is a big issue – and it puts huge pressure on schools in some areas. And those softie Southerners looking for the good life always seem to settle in the areas of the best state schools.

In the short term, there is precious little we can do. If schools choose children according to distance from their gates, there will be large patches of the country where no one has a chance of getting to a good school. If schools choose pupils by ballot, then people living next to a school that they love will find themselves bussed to a school they dislike miles away. If we up-sticks and move into the catchment area for the school we like, or get religion to qualify for a faith school, then we become the immigrant, displacing someone who lives there already, not solving the problem but passing it on.

What can we do? Build lots more schools; the Government says there is no money. Limit the number of foreign immigrants – it is already too late in some areas. The only answer is to plan for the long term.

We need a new way of thinking. The first belief that we must junk is that it is bad to have "surplus places" in the system. Politicians have made surplus places into a bugbear, something which should be avoided at all costs in the name of efficiency. But that is nonsense. No decent business runs at full capacity – when did you last turn up at Tesco to be told "sorry, we are full!"? Without surplus school places, there can be no choice for most people. So let people found "free schools" – but if, and only if, it makes more room for the rest of us.

Secondly, we must give up on the ideas that bad schools have to be allowed time to turn themselves round, and that schools have to run themselves. We have to insist that weak schools partner with good schools sooner rather than later. It is the quickest and best proven way of improving overall performance and you end up with double the schools that you like, and none of the schools that you want to get away from.

There is no quick fix to school choice, especially in these financially tough times. Real options will not be available to all, some of us will have to grin and bear it – or get faith or move. But we mustn't give up hope, the politicians need a kick up the backside – a first class education should be the right of all children, not just the privileged few.

Sue Fieldman is the regional editor of The Good Schools Guide, which has in depth reviews of the best state schools in the country and has the catchment areas of every state school.

Link to www.goodschoolsguide.co.uk