It is tough being a parent in our school system. Just as you breathe a sigh of relief that your child has started out on the new school year, you are asked to start thinking about next year's school admissions.

Like other parents we participated in the annual game of school admissions roulette

The advertisements are appearing in the local newspaper, the dates are being set for the autumn round of school open days and evenings, and soon you will have to fill in those multiple forms stating your school choices for next year.

I am still recovering from last year's long campaign. Exactly a year ago, my wife and I began the process by visiting prospective schools for our 11-year-old daughter.

It took nine more months of form-filling and anxious phone calls before we knew which school she would be going to.

We made our choices and filled out the forms. One went to the local education authority. Another went directly to a school which controlled its own admissions.

And, because we live close to a council boundary, a third went to the neighbouring education authority.

Different dates

Then the long wait began. Just as the application deadlines had varied, so too did the dates when the offers were made.

Independent schools, as is common, gained a competitive advantage in the trawl for the brightest pupils by making their offers several days ahead of the LEA schools.

To add to the confusion, the neighbouring education authority made its offer two weeks later than our own.

Still, it could be worse. Unlike in some areas of the country, at least all the local foundation and voluntary aided schools, which run their own admissions, agreed to co-ordinate timings with the LEA.

As the offers started to trickle out, like other parents we participated in the annual game of school admissions roulette.

Offers come in

We played by the rules - we did not hold more than one school place offer at a time.

We could not release our place until we knew whether we would get a place at our favourite school

But we did accept offers which we hoped we would not have to take up. To do otherwise could have left us with no school at all.

First to offer was our third choice school. We held that offer for two weeks, temporarily blocking some other child being offered a place there.

Two weeks later we received an offer from our second choice school which was in the neighbouring LEA. We accepted that, releasing the offer we had been holding.

The place we now held was at a heavily oversubscribed school and we knew many others were on the waiting list.

Blocking others

But we could not release our place until we knew whether we would get a place at our favourite school.

It was quite possible that while we were holding a place at our second choice school, another family which would have liked that place was holding a place at our first choice school. If only we could have arranged a swap.

This is an area of the law where definitions have all the clarity of a foggy November evening

The waiting, and the churning of school places, went on. Finally, with just weeks of the summer term left, we received the offer from our first choice school.

This is the annual rigmarole which is now just starting all over again up and down the country.

Surely there is a better way of doing all this?

Proposed changes

Indeed, that is what the government is hoping to achieve with its current proposals for changes to the law on school admissions.

The changes are complex. This is an area of the law where definitions have all the clarity of a foggy November evening.

The main proposal is to require school admissions to be centrally co-ordinated so schools in an area make their offers on the same day.

Sadly, of course, this will only apply to state maintained schools. The independent sector will still be able to do its own thing.

In practical terms, a co-ordinated admissions process should mean parents filling in just one application form and returning it to their local education authority.

Not happy

On that single form they could include foundation or voluntary aided schools or even schools from other local education authorities.

None of this should prevent selective, foundation or voluntary aided church schools from continuing to apply their own admissions criteria, whether based on ability, aptitude or religious commitment.

There is still the issue of whether parents will be required to put schools in an order of preference

The government is surely right to be looking to improve these procedures. There is a lot of anxiety and discontent over school choice.

Government-commissioned research suggests that 15% of parents do not get the school they regard as their first choice. The same proportion expressed dissatisfaction with the admissions process itself.

In some parts of the country, particularly urban areas where there is a greater theoretical choice of schools, dissatisfaction is much greater: 30% of London parents do not get a place at their favourite school. Admissions appeals are several times higher in London than the rest of the country.

Priorities

Of course, better co-ordination of the admissions process will not solve the basic problem that some schools are more popular than others and not everyone can get their first choice.

There is still the issue of whether parents will be required to put schools in an order of preference and whether first-choice applications are favoured over second choices.

There are other ways of resolving the problem of admissions. For example, popular schools could be required to expand.

But increasing their size could change the success and popularity of those schools. Allowing expansion is one thing - requiring it would not work.

We could also follow the system that operates in many parts of the USA. When I moved there temporarily, I was told my children were guaranteed places at the allocated neighbourhood school.

More trouble ahead?

On registration day, the school had two dozen more students than they had expected. The children were not sent away. Instead the school district sent along extra teachers.

After several years of parental choice (or at least the right to express a preference), it is unimaginable that we could move back to a system where the local education allocates places by neighbourhood catchment areas.

But squaring the circle of choice and satisfaction is very difficult. The current plans to create more specialist, and distinctive faith-based schools could well lead to more, not less, parental dissatisfaction.

It is one thing to see your local comprehensive turned into a shiny, new specialist languages or technology college.

But quite another if you cannot get your child into it because some places have been reserved for students with a particular aptitude for that specialism even though they live further from the school than your child does.