You’ve got to have faith

Of all the reasons for choosing to live in a ground-floor flat rather than a first-floor one, it might not occur to you that your choice could be the game-changing clincher in your child’s educational prospects — but so it is.

In the terrifying admissions criteria for Britain’s oversubscribed faith and church primary schools, you will often find these words: ‘If applicants share the same address point (for example, if they live in the same block of flats), priority will be given to those who live closest to the ground floor and then by ascending flat-number order.’

That detail gives a hint of the desperation of these schools to seem ‘fair’, and of the desperation of parents to get their first child into them. (Once your first child is in, of course, you’re home and dry, thanks to the siblings policies.) ‘Distance is measured from the central point of the child’s home address to the main entrance of the school using the local authority’s computerised measuring system,’ says the admissions page for the Larmenier and Sacred Heart Primary School in Hammersmith, west London.