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. Such sentences lead to bouts of tape-measure-related insomnia. Where exactly is ‘the central point’ your home address? What if it’s the spot on the carpet with the vomit-stain?

But don’t get too excited, even if you happen to live in the ground-floor flat next door to an oversubscribed Catholic primary school. There are other key factors that come well above that one. As with all primary schools, ‘looked-after children’ get first priority — only in this case, you have to be a ‘Catholic looked-after child’. (This euphemism, meaning ‘in care’, is always rather sad: there’s something inherently not-looked-after about a looked-after child.) Second priority goes to ‘A Catholic child with a Certificate of Catholic Practice, baptised Catholic within 12 months of birth from Catholic families who are resident in the parish.’