Parents resort to fraud in the scramble for places at Birmingham's best schools
Cases of fraud where parents use false addresses in a desperate attempt to get their children into Birmingham’s most popular schools have risen by almost two thirds in two years.
Parents are renting houses they don’t live in or using grandparents’ addresses in an increasing number of cases as schools report up to ten pupils competing for every place at the top primary and secondary schools in the city.
The Birmingham Post has discovered that 11 families were caught using false addresses last year in an attempt to apply for schools before the council even made an offer of a school place.
The city’s education department also withdrew places that had already been allocated to three children.
Birmingham investigated 48 cases of alleged school place fraud in 2009, which is a jump from 30 cases in 2007.
A spokesman for the city council said it investigated applications across the city, but the hotspot areas include oversubscribed schools in Sutton Coldfield and Hall Green.
A third of Birmingham ten-year-olds currently miss out on their first choice of secondary school, although 85 per cent were offered a place at one of their top three preferences this year.
The clamour for places has seen a rise in the number of parents cheating the system by using addresses belonging to grandparents, converting to another faith or buying and renting houses within school catchment areas.
A new method is falsely claiming that their children are related to other pupils who are already at the school.
The claim allows them to jump up the list via the sibling rule, which guarantees places for brothers or sisters of current pupils.
Councillor Jon Hunt, chairman of the city’s education overview and scrutiny committee, said: “This is a very real issue because every application has to be checked and that ties up resources.
“Some aspects like addresses are easy to detect, but it is getting to the point where we may have to ask to see birth certificates.
“The use of the sibling rule has become very difficult for us. Families are becoming more complicated and there is little that we can do to check some of these family ties. Once a child is in, all of the children can use the sibling rule.
“In some schools the allocation has been so tight for specific years that they have allocated their entire quota of places on the sibling rule.
“A few years ago this was especially true in some schools in Sutton Coldfield and Hall Green, but I don’t know if the demographics have since changed.
“This needs specific legislation. Many councils have been accused of going ‘over the top’ and there has been some controversy over others using anti-terror laws. But the penalties do need to be clearly set out.
