My children just started a new secondary school this term. But their current secondary school was not their 1st or 2nd choice as a matter of the fact it was not among our 6 choices. Now, how this happen? The borough of London that we are living in likes to give the impression that it interacts with parents and takes their concerns into consideration when placing their children into its secondary schools. It seems they don’t actually, we were not given any of the schools we had selected, that we painfully investigated, we went to this school as parents, walked around and inspected their sites, talked to their teachers, looked at the websites went through their documentation and after all that was given an under-subscribed secondary school which was nearest to our front door, the bureaucrats had calculated this, using a complex algorithm - well not that complex, just it was the nearest. Another thing was that had made this particular school was undesirable because of