Thousands of parents were preparing yesterday to mount admissions challenges for their children amid fierce competition for places at the best state secondary schools. Nearly half of children in some local authorities failed to get places at their first choice after secondary school offers were received by about 600,000 families yesterday.

London authorities did particularly badly. Only 48 per cent of parents in Wandsworth, 56 per cent in Lambeth and 61 per cent in Barnet got into their first choice school, while Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Brent disappointed nearly a third of applicants.

In Buckinghamshire, 44 per cent of pupils missed out on their first choice of secondary. In Birmingham 36 per cent missed out, while in Kent more than a quarter of children were disappointed.

Other councils claimed that almost everyone got into their first choice. Just 8.3 per cent of children in Cambridge did not get offered a place at their first choice school.

The figures illustrate the scale of the challenge facing Tony Blair in making good Labour’s pledge that all parents can get their children into a good school, where the majority of 16-year-olds achieve five or more good GCSE passes.

The Prime Minister has said that he wants to put “parent power” and choice at the heart of Labour’s education policies, but many children and their parents found yesterday that they had very few choices open to them.

In Brighton, where parents are preparing a legal challenge to prevent oversubscribed schools from using a lottery to choose new pupils from next year, Ruby Webbe was in tears and inconsolable for an hour.

Ruby’s parents, Rick Webbe and Kay Stephan, wanted her to attend Dorothy Stringer High School, one of the best performing schools in the city, but were offered a place at Patcham High School, where just 22 per cent of pupils attained good GCSEs, including maths and English, last year — less than half the national average.

Ms Stephan, 44, who runs a training and development consultancy, said: “Ruby is devastated. I picked her up from school, told her the news and we had an hour of crying. It’s not fair.

“We have lived in our road for seven years and Ruby has always expected to go to Dorothy Stringer, just over a mile away. Many of her friends will be going there. What a mess. We don’t stand a chance appealing. She’s 84th on the waiting list. But she is not going to Patcham. Full-stop.”

Instead Mr Webbe, 47, an osteopath, and Ms Stephan, who also have a son aged 6, plan to send their daughter to £9,000-a-year St Mary’s Hall, a private school with a good track record.

A spokesman for Brighton City Council said that competition for places at Blatchington Mill had been so fierce that the “golden halo” around the school where pupils have to live to be sure of a place, had shrunk from 2.3km (1½ miles) last year to 1.5km this year. This was partly the result of better-off parents moving close to the school to ensure a place.

Pat Hawkes. Brighton schools councillor, said that the shrinking of the halo showed why the council needed to replace the proximity criteria for school admission with a lottery system, based on fixed catchment areas.

John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that the political rhetoric about school choice, had raised many parents’ expectations unrealistically.

“The admissions system needs to be made much clearer so that parents recognise that they can exercise a preference, not a choice,” he said.

He added that the appeals system should also be clarified so that parents were prevented from appealing against an offer of a place purely on the grounds that they did not like the school offered to them.

An Education Department spokesman said that nationally, 85 per cent of parents are offered a place at the school they most want. Parents have two weeks to lodge an appeal.

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