Parents who lie about about where they live to secure a place for their children at high-achieving state schools are being targeted by councils and schools.

The Government has ordered authorities to increase vigilance when processing admissions because research suggests that nearly half of children in some local authorities have missed out on their first choice of secondary school this year.

The process of informing more than half a million pupils of which school they will attend began yesterday. It is estimated that at least 100,000 will miss out on their preferred school, with the new schools admission code heightening the problem.

Councils have adopted a variety of methods to detect fraudulent applications and have become expert at spotting signs of fraud, such as the same address appearing on the school application forms of different families year after year.

Authorities will be re-examining all suspicious applications — many of which are brought to their attention by disgruntled parents who have missed out on places — between now and the start of the next school year in September.

Birmingham City Council confirmed yesterday that it has adopted “under-the-radar” methods to catch parents falsifying their applications but refused to divulge tactics for fear that parents would seek a means to circumvent them.

“We do a lot of work behind the scenes. We don’t want to talk about it too much because we don’t want to give the game away,” a spokesman said.

Hertfordshire County Council is now carrying out random spot checks asking parents to provide proof of permanent address.

Last year a 12-year-old boy had his school place in the county taken away by the High Court when his parents were unable to provide proof of his permanent address.

In Wandsworth, South London, where between ten and twenty parents are caught cheating each year, addresses on secondary transfer applications are also compared to addresses held by all primary schools. One oversubscribed school in the borough sends correspondence about school place offers to “The parent”, simply followed by the address, to foil parents who no longer live there but who hope to use a Royal Mail redirection service to receive school letters.

Parents caught cheating usually have their offer of a place withdrawn and are sent to the back of the waiting list for all schools in the authority.

Local authorities routinely require school applicants to provide proof of residence (usually a council tax bill, an entry on the electoral roll or rental agreement) but many only require parents to live at the specified address on the date the application form has to be submitted — some time around October 20 of the year before the child would start at secondary school.

Many parents take advantage of this to rent — or even buy — a home for a few weeks or months, sometimes without moving in.

Ranjit Dhanda, branch manager at Bairstow Eves in Birmingham, said that there was a £10,000 to £20,000 mark-up in prices within the catchment area of King Edward VI Handsworth school, one of the most oversubscribed schools in the country. “People have bought a house just to get within a catchment area and then sold the house straight afterwards, because there is so much importance about getting into the right schools.

“Lettings are a cheaper way around it, so you’ll let something out for six months,” he said.

One head in Hertfordshire has hired a private detective to check on parents’ addresses.

It is harder to catch non-believers who fake a religion to get into a church school. But they have to be determined to succeed.

They will have to get a written reference from their vicar or priest to get into the most popular church schools. If the school is very heavily oversubscribed, weekly attendance at church will not be enough.

One parent contacted by The Times, who rented a house in a school catchment area that he never lived in to get his daughter into a high-achieving school, said that he felt he had no choice. “I feel I have had to cheat. It occurs to me that some little person somewhere down the line is not now going to this good school because my daughter has her place,” he said.

The crackdown on school-list cheats comes after the introduction this year of a tougher new Admissions Code designed to prevent backdoor selection in state schools, for example, by interview and to make the admissions process more transparent.

A spokesman for the Department for Children Schools and Families said: “We expect local authorities to take a tough line on any potential abuses of the system. Admissions should be fair and equal for all children and their parents — that’s why we have tightened up the law.”

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