The adjudicators have told two grant-maintained secondary schools in the Croydon education authority, south London, that they cannot introduce partial selection next year.

And three schools in Wandsworth, south-west London, have had their selection procedures curbed.

The schools in Croydon had been intending to select 15% of their pupils by ability.

"Partial selection arrangements, to be lawful, have to have been in place in September 1997," the ruling says. "The arrangements at Coulsdon High School and Norbury Manor Girls High School were not."

Raising standards

Croydon's education authority had objected to the plans. In the case of Coulsdon, it said it had examples of children being denied entry to a school which would normally be regarded as their local school, owing to partial selection arrangements.

Croydon also said there was no evidence that the school could cater better for high ability pupils than any other school in Croydon nor was there any evidence that the presence of high ability pupils was leading to raised standards generally in the school.

Similar arguments were used in the Norbury Manor case. There, the school had claimed it was suffering a "brain drain" of local pupils into "highly selective schools" nearby.

It said that 85% of its places went automatically to pupils who were mainly from the three local primary schools nearby.

Pupils 'stressed'

The Office of the Schools Adjudicator has also ruled on selection at three schools in Wandsworth, south-west London, about admission tests at Burntwood School, Ernest Bevin College and Graveney School.

This followed complaints by parents and the governors at Honeywell Infant and Junior Schools.

They had argued that selection stressed pupils, denied places to local children, forcing them into hazardous journeys to school, and skewed the intake of schools across the borough, with those practising partial selection "creaming off" the brightest pupils.

The adjudication office says it had to balance the interests of local parents against the need to maintain the effort the schools were making to improve educational standards.

Wandsworth education authority had said the stress caused by multiple tests would be reduced by the adoption of one common test next September.

Bright children

It said partial selection had succeeded in retaining in the borough's schools bright children who would otherwise have taken places outside or in the independent sector.

The success of a "comprehensive system of secondary provision rather than a system of comprehensive schools" showed in the borough's results, Wandsworth said.

Ten years ago, a third of its school places were unfilled. Now schools were over-subscribed and overall GCSE success was improving faster than the national average, it said.

"The adjudicator concluded that to abandon partial selection, in the particular circumstances of this part of inner London, would be unwise," the adjudication office says.

"However, in order to enable more local children to attend the schools and reduce the amount of travel involved in getting to school, he decided that the proportion of children admitted through selection by ability should be reduced: from 50% to about 25% in the case of Graveney and Ernest Bevin and from 31% to about 25% at Burntwood."

More to come

Other decisions due in coming weeks could abolish partial selection in dozens more schools across the country.

Rules allowing comprehensive schools to select up to 15% of their intake by ability were introduced by the previous Conservative government.

Labour has not stopped the practice but schools are not allowed to increase the proportion of pupils selected or change the basis of selection.

The new government also introduced the schools adjudicators under the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. They consider objections to arrangements made, from September 2000 onwards, for admitting children to the schools their parents want.