I am not a complete idiot. I understand that if a school is full then a school is full.

But I am sick and tired of reading figures produced by the likes of Oxfordshire County Council’s former Cabinet member for schools improvement, Michael Waine and his colleagues, regarding the allocation of school places for 2011.

Here’s the spin: 434 children living in the Abingdon area were offered a school place and of these: 83.87 per cent were offered a school listed as a first preference; 7.60 per cent were offered a second preference; 2.07 per cent were offered a third preference; 6.45 per cent could not be offered a first, second or third preference and were offered the nearest school with a vacancy; 93.54 per cent of the applicants were offered a school which had been requested as a parental preference.

Apparently, to help achieve these amazing figures, and to ensure there were sufficient school places in Abingdon, the council made arrangements to utilise spare capacity at two school sites in Abingdon and provide funding for additional staff, creating an additional 55 places.

But why only 55 when the maximum number of children is 30 per class? If they took an extra five children, five families would not be suffering this misery.

Maybe next year, someone with a shred of common sense might think about whether the school can cope with extra children. One of the schools has underachieving pupils already.

But aside from the figures, what about the families who are now under huge amounts of stress because of this fiasco?

What anyone seems to be failing to address is, how many of the families of the approximately 41 children offered their second or third preference, will have to get to two schools at the same time every morning to drop off their children – and then repeat the whole stressful experience again later in the day to pick them up?

Then there are the poor souls who have not been offered any of their choices.

We selected three schools for our child, one of which was our catchment school, but we were not offered any of them.

Well done to the council for making our child the unlucky one who has to travel past six schools to get to one which is not only under-achieving but is nearly three miles away from our house.

Thank you so much for giving me the chance to walk nearly 12 miles per day to take my daughter to school.

I could put my four year-old on the free school bus the council is kindly providing. But would anyone want to send their child to school on their own at four years old? I don’t think so.

The continued interest list and appeals process are a waste of time for most of us.

Some of the advice I have been given, such as “can you not move closer to your catchment school” is an even bigger joke. I already live in the catchment area for one of the schools and where did that get me?

Thanks council, for keeping me up at night with worry. I can’t wait to have my child’s fate confirmed on June 17.

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