The admissions process is costing popular secondary schools �20,000 a year, says one of the country's most successful head teachers.

Elizabeth Phillips, head of the most improved secondary school last year, says that the admissions process is expensive to schools and upsetting for families who do not understand how places are allocated.

In her own school, St Marylebone Church of England School in Westminster, she says that dealing with applications can tie up large amounts of time for herself and senior staff.

When her estimate of �20,000 in staffing costs is applied nationally, she says that this represents a huge sum of money which is otherwise needed for classroom staff and resources.

This year, her school has received 793 applications for 120 places - and the processing and interviewing of families involved 14 staff working over four Saturdays.

There are then 140 appeals against decisions to be considered, which she says takes up a full seven working days of her time - and for which the school has to pay another �2,000 for an appeals clerk.

No real choice

Apart from the amount of time spent by staff, she is also very aware of the amount of anguish the applications process can bring to parents and children.

"Parents have been told they have choice, but they don't really," she says. "The whole admissions process has never been thought through - and in this respect the law is an ass."

Using her own school as an example, she says that many applicants have no real chance of getting a place in an already oversubscribed school.

But she says that many parents either do not understand or hope to find a way round the way places are allocated, which in her Church of England school is likely to mean being resident within the diocese.

Parents' concerns

"I really feel for the parents. If you live in an area with poor schools, of course you want to get your children in somewhere where they'll have the best chance," she says.

But the pressure on places means that most applicants are going to fail, which she says "can leave the children feeling rejected", when in practice they had little chance of ever being accepted.

There are also cases where parents who are appealing against a rejection have not told their children that they have not been offered a place.

And she says she is sympathetic to the problems of local authorities under pressure to deliver places in the schools that parents want to use.

"You can't just conjure up places or produce a new school," she says.

And when appeals panels decide to overturn the school's decision, she says this creates more problems, as additional pupils have to be fitted into already full year groups - which inevitably leads to bigger classes than intended.