Moving to secondary school can be a stressful time

In London, the most complex area, organisers say all but 80 of the 80,000 children moving to secondary school this autumn have been offered a place.

Even in March, at the height of the complaints that things had gone wrong, far fewer children were without places.

Elsewhere around the country things are also said to be better than last year.

Multiple offers

This was the first year that all 150 education authorities across England were required to co-ordinate their school admissions.

In the past, parents might have had to complete a number of different application forms for schools.

They might then have held some offers of places while hoping for what they regarded as a better offer - in turn preventing other children from being offered their preferred schools.

For this year, using a common application form, parents could apply to up to six schools and would receive only one offer, all at the same time.

'Success'

The founder of the Pan-London Register, Ian Birnbaum of the Sutton education authority, said there were about 80,000 applicants.

By the 1 March deadline 3,500 had not been offered a place.

Things were complicated by problems with the Capita software being used by eight education authorities out of the 40 involved.

But he said it was estimated that at the same time last year there had been 8,000 children without places.

As of last week, just 80 did not have a place.

"That's quite a success," he said.

He said the degree of co-operation between authorities had been unprecedented.

Preferences met

The Department for Education and Skills has not generally collated figures for outside London, but did so this year in light of the media reports of problems with the new system.

"As you can see the statistics that we gathered tell a different story," a spokesman said.

Its figures are now three weeks old, so the situation might well be even better by now.

Manchester, for example, had 25 unplaced pupils out of 5,574 applicants, pending appeals.

A total of 5,448 or 97% had been offered one of their preferred schools - "a clear improvement on the situation at the same time last year".

At the same stage last year Derbyshire had 70 unplaced pupils, while this year there were four - and even those had been offered places, but their parents had refused them.

Overall, 96% had been offered one of their preferred schools and 82% were going to their first preference.

In a report last year, the Commons education committee said research published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2001 had found that 92% of parents surveyed were offered a place in their first preference school.

Overall, 96% received an offer of a place in a school for which they had expressed a preference.

But the committee said that only 85% were offered a place at their "favourite" school - the one they would have wished for, whether they had put it as first choice or not.

"This suggests that parents are making strategic decisions not only about which school they most want for their child, but also about their chances of securing a place at that school and are adjusting their behaviour accordingly," the MPs said.