School gate blog: How does it really feel to lose out in the secondary school admissions process? One parent tells us.

Adam and Luke Bolton are identical twins who do everything together, but this week they were told that not only have they been allocated places in different secondary schools, but also that the schools are 18 miles apart.

The news has come as a bombshell. The ten-year-old boys read the same books, play the same computer games and, although they have separate bedrooms, have sleepovers in each other's rooms every weekend.

They have different hobbies — Luke plays piano and is a footballer, Adam prefers reading — but most of the time they stick together. To date their biggest anxiety has been being asked to sit at different tables in their class at Tewin Cowper Primary School, in Hertfordshire.

Their mother, Ann Connolly, said: “When we applied to secondary school we tried to prepare them for the fact that they might be put in different classes. That would be a huge step for them. So for them to find themselves in different schools is very distressing.

“Twins are not like other children. They have a total reliance on each other to be their primary friend and they look to each in stressful situations.”

Adam and Luke are a living example of a problem highlighted this week by Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary.

Hertfordshire is one of 25 local authorities that use a lottery system to allocate places in oversubscribed schools. The aim of the lottery is to make school admissions fairer and prevent middle-class parents from playing the system by buying or renting homes close to the best schools.

Ms Connolly said that the thinking behind the system was muddled. “It makes it impossible to make a rational choice of school because you can have no idea in advance what will be your chances of getting in,” Ms Connolly said.

“I asked the local authority if they could allocate places to two children together via the lottery process but they said that would bias its random nature and so couldn't be allowed. It is ludicrous.”

Mr Balls agrees and has asked the Schools Adjudicator to look at the issue of twins being split in lottery-based systems. “I am asking the Schools Adjudicator to look at how we can make crystal clear in guidance and in the [School Admissions] Code that splitting up twins when parents don't want them to be split is the wrong thing to do,” Mr Balls said.

Luke was allocated a place at the twins' first choice, Richard Hale school in Hertford, which is a six-mile (9km) bus ride from the Bolton home, while Adam was given a place at their second choice, Verulam School in St Albans, which is 12 miles from the house in the opposite direction and an hour away by train and bus.

Ms Connolly, who works in the pharmaceutical industry, said: “All I can do is put Adam on the waiting list for Robert Hale and hope that a place becomes available, but it could be months before we hear and in the mean time we just have to sit and wait.”

What is particularly frustrating to her is that now that one twin has been allocated a place at the Robert Hale, the family can take advantage of the school's sibling rule to get the other one in.

This effectively means that Adam will be higher up on the waiting list than he otherwise would be.

Ms Connolly said that it was bizarre that the boys counted as siblings only after the first round of applications but not when they first applied.

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