Spurn thy neighbour

Lisa Miles was hoping and expecting that her nine-year-old daughter, Poppy, would be able to transfer in two years' time to Acland Burghley secondary school in Tufnell Park, north London, only 10 minutes' walk from home. She has an older daughter there already, but Charley will finish A-levels and leave a year too soon to ensure her sister is given a place as a sibling.

Poppy will no longer get the place her parents were expecting because the local education authority has just changed its admission procedures. Under new rules, pupils at Camden primary schools will take precedence over children who go to schools in neighbouring boroughs. Poppy attends Yerbury school, just across the border in Islington. The rules are due to come into effect from September 2005, when Poppy will be applying. They will also exclude Poppy's little brother Zak, who is also atYerbury.

The schools Poppy and Zak will be left with are much further away, and, although they are improving, are much less successful. Poppy and her friends in her primary class are now left looking around for alternatives.

The switch has jolted the hopes of scores of local families like Poppy's. Islington has three primary schools where more than half the pupils go to Camden secondaries; 1,800 pupils currently at Camden secondaries came from Islington primaries. If Camden's decision proves lawful, it is likely to be used across the country by other boroughs with good schools, to shut out their neighbours - and, in a domino effect, by authorities on their boundaries, who are likely to come under pressure from parents to apply the same rules.

Camden's new admissions policy threatens to undermine the Greenwich ruling, the principle decided by the law lords in 1989, which laid down that LEA-maintained schools must not give priority to children simply because they live in the borough.

The ruling was even described by the DfES in its latest admissions code of practice as a "sensible" recognition of the fact that "often parents live in one LEA but are close to schools in a neighbouring authority".

Neighbouring education authorities are already at loggerheads with Camden over the plan, which will do little to foster the spirit of cooperation on admissions introduced by the DfES last year with its London Challenge. It was designed to transform the capital's secondary schools ("to promote real and permanent collaboration between LEAs to strengthen their school improvement arrangements"). Islington and Haringey, which border Camden, have referred the policy to the independent schools adjudicator, who is due to decide this week whether the policy can go ahead. Legal aid has already been granted for parents to challenge it in the high court, and the judicial review is likely in late spring if the adjudicator gives the policy the green light.

Camden will not allow its officers or councillors to discuss the arguments because it does not want to prejudice the pending legal action. But its stated reason for the new admissions criteria is to allow more Camden primary schoolchildren to move on to its secondaries. Currently a third have to leave the borough, mostly squeezed out by pupils from neighbouring areas.

Camden brought in Professor Maurice Galton, co-author of The Impact of School Transitions and Transfers on Pupil Progress and Attainment, who, Camden says, "endorsed the proposed change in admissions criteria as a positive step towards improving arrangements for the smooth transfer of pupils from primary to secondary schools".

Galton found that some ethnic minority groups and pupils with special educational needs find the transition hard, and that there is a group of students, mainly able boys, whose attitudes decline after transfer to secondary school.

Camden also cites a recent Ofsted survey of 32 primary schools in eight boroughs, which found that "continuity in the curriculum and progression in learning as pupils move from primary to secondary schools are longstanding weaknesses of the education system. All the schools involved in this survey recognised the need to improve continuity and progression, but few of them were giving sufficient priority to a task that can be difficult and time-consuming, especially where the schools have a large number of partners".

The change does not breach the Greenwich ruling, Camden argues, because if you get into a Camden primary, you get equal treatment wherever you live. But Pat Cattell, chair of governors at Acland Burghley, argues that for schools on the border like hers, it is a mistake to assume that taking only from Camden primaries makes for the smoothest transition. "The border is a historical accident," she says. "There has been a school on the site for 100 years. The school serves the community. It has good links with feeder schools - there is a high degree of continuity with these primaries already."

The legal argument of the judicial review will be that educational considerations are secondary. Graham French, the solicitor acting for the family bringing the case, says: "On its face, the admissions policy is designed to give priority to children attending Camden primary schools, whether or not they live in Camden, but in truth it is to favour Camden residents, which is unlawful."

Already, resourceful parents have started to adapt to the new rules. Some have moved school. "We lost two or three from year 3 at Christmas," says Archie Onslow, chairman of governors at Yerbury. His school, which is popular, can refill some of these gaps, but there are Islington primaries only just out of special measures and such losses could be very damaging, he says.

Lisa Miles, meanwhile, doesn't want to play the game the way she knows others will. "I wonder if I've done the right thing by not changing to a Camden school, but I don't believe in it," she says. "I want the group affected to stick together and to go to whichever school we go to en masse."