You are exactly right. Even my mother struggled to understand how school admissions work these days (“you’d better hurry up and put X’s name down then”; “surely you live too far away to get in there”; etc).
I feel really strongly about this. The system is too complicated, it’s inconsistent (as this thread has shown), and inaccessible. And then you find that because only certain people have the time or the inclination to wade their way through it, it self perpetuates.
The data is out there to make informed decisions, but you have to go looking for it. I am a total geek and I did masses of research; I looked at admissions criteria for all the schools I was interested in, worked out which criterion we would be eligible for (different in the case of each school), then went back 5 years and looked at the historic admissions data to see how often children from our admissions criterion had been admitted. And that’s before you get into comparing the academic performance statistics, which is another opaque exercise in itself.
And then I recorded the whole thing on an Excel spreadsheet.
As I say, I am a geek. If we are serious about social mobility in this country we need to make it easier for everyone to access, process and understand the data so that every family has the opportunity to make an informed decision about the right school for their child, and maximise their chances of getting a school they want by only listing schools on their application form that they have a realistic chance of getting. I know a number of people who have put down schools that statistically they were never going to get, just in hope or on the off chance, and have ended up with a school they really didn’t want. Conversely I know people who have played the system and obtained a place at a school they were not entitled to, which is not fair on anyone.
Equal access for all. There’s a long way to go.