Sudbourne primary school in Brixton, south London is the sort of school everyone likes to hear about. Located in an urban neighbourhood with high crime rates and high unemployment, it gets good exam results and has not excluded a single child in five years. It is a Beacon School, designated by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) as "amongst the best performing in the country" and exemplifying "successful practice ... to be brought to the attention of the rest of the education service with a view to sharing and spreading that effective practice to others".

One practice the school takes very seriously is supporting children through the transition from primary to secondary school. There is substantial evidence that many children begin to fall by the wayside when they make the transition, losing enthusiasm for learning and becoming alienated from school. Like many primary schools Sudbourne tries to prepare children before the move by accompanying them to "taster" days at their future school. It also keeps in touch with more vulnerable children after the transition by visiting them at their secondary school.

Sounds straightforward, but for Sudbourne school this practice is extremely difficult because last year the school's 45 leavers were dispersed among 25 different secondary schools. Like children in several inner London boroughs, Brixton children have no local school, and the schools nearest to their homes are full and oversubscribed. Schools have been closed down and the sites sold by the local education authority because they were unpopular with parents and so had too many surplus places. As a result, friendship groups are being routinely broken up and children expected to travel miles to often equally unpopular schools in unfamiliar neighbourhoods.

And the situation shows little sign of improving in the short term. Brixton is in the London borough of Lambeth where census figures indicate a population of about 3,200 11 year olds next September. But according to the local education authority only 1,557 places will be available in Lambeth for children starting secondary school.

Sudbourne school governor and parent Devon Alison explains: "They should be going to secondary school together in a cohort so the primary school can support the transition. I calculated that the 45 children who left Sudbourne last year are now travelling 1,600 road miles per week between them to get to school and back."

Alison, who is leading a campaign for a new mixed, non-denominational secondary school in Brixton, believes the shortage of local schools is seriously damaging the educational prospects of local children. "There is institutional unfairness when children in Brixton are never the closest to any school - it blights their chances. There are about 20 primary schools in this area with no local secondary school."

Splitting up primary school friendship groups and making children travel long distances to school makes it more difficult for them to settle at secondary school and more likely that they will stop attending regularly, says Alison.

"People know it makes it a lot harder for them to stay in school and to achieve. They get sick of the travelling and it makes it more likely that they won't go.

"Families risk being fined for problems that educational experts know will arise if kids are made to travel long distances. A child is less likely to succeed with a five-mile journey to make every day to a place where they know no one. And all this travelling deprives them of leisure time, time with their families and time to study."

Her case is supported by research published by the DfES on children's transition from primary to secondary school last autumn.¹ A main finding of the three-year project was that friendships are important educationally as well as socially, and that teachers should recognise the value of peer support in the classroom for year seven children.

In Hackney there is a similar story. After closing two of its secondary schools because they were deemed to be failing, it has only one non-denominational mixed secondary school. Next September there will be school places for less than 60 per cent of its resident year 7 children, including the places provided by a new City Academy due to open on the site of the old Hackney Downs school at the start of next school year.

Education in Hackney is now run by a private company, the Learning Trust. When the Learning Trust cannot find a child a suitable place in a Hackney school it rings round other boroughs until it finds a school with an empty place, then informs the parent that the place is available. If parents decline to send their child several miles to school in another borough, or to a school they consider unsuitable for other reasons, the child may not go to school at all. The Learning Trust told 0-19 that in early December they knew of at least 55 year 7 children in the borough without a school place anywhere. And the Learning Trust freely admits that there are more, unidentified children without a school place.

"Our schools are full and oversubscribed. We can't make a school in another borough take a pupil, and we can't make the parent accept the place. We try to help them find a school place, and we have that responsibility but we can only exercise our responsibility in respect of children we know about. We shouldn't overestimate the degree to which we can police the situation," said a spokesperson from the Learning Trust.

Children who arrive in the borough after age 11 are no better off. Paul Murphy is a qualified teacher who now works for a community project in Hackney helping children from newly arrived asylum seeker families access education. Although he finds the staff at the Learning Trust very keen to help, it is often months before young people get into school. "It's usually OK with primary school children, but when a family comes through the door with an older child my heart sinks."

In the worst case Murphy has dealt with, a family applied for a place for their 14-year-old son in January last year and in October had still been offered nothing. By then the boy was on medication for depression.

"The trouble is you can only appeal to individual schools and you have to come up with a reason why the child should go to that school in particular. We haven't got reasons for one school over another - we just want a place. And there aren't any."

So how has this situation arisen, and what is being done to improve it?

Astonishingly, Ofsted, in its inspection report on Hackney local education authority, published on 19 January, describes the borough's school place planning as "highly satisfactory".²

The DfES seems oblivious to the problem. A spokesperson told 0-19: "Every local authority has responsibility for providing enough places for the children in the area. We leave it to local authorities to ensure they do, and don't keep figures centrally." Although both Lambeth and Hackney are among the five boroughs in the government's new London Challenge programme, there is no mention in the London Challenge report of problems being created by the serious underprovision of school places in these boroughs.³ Instead, the fact that many children are not at school in their own boroughs is interpreted as evidence only of parental dissatisfaction with local schools.

However, the Government Office for London seems to have woken up to the crisis. In a submission to London mayor Ken Livingstone's draft London. Plan, it identifies two "key objectives" for education in London - an increase in the number of school places, and a reduction in number of children travelling long distances to school.

The plight of children at Sudbourne and others like them is the result of past and present governments' emphasis on parental choice, combined with pressure from the Audit Commission and Ofsted for efficiency in education spending.⁴ A report from Ofsted on school place planning last year spells out the social polarisation that parental choice has created.⁵

"Parental preference exacerbates a number of problems. An unpopular and low-attaining school with spare places may lose more pupils, becoming the only school in an area with places for excluded or mobile pupils and so entering a spiral of decline. In these circumstances parents with high aspirations for their children may believe that the school cannot meet these. This resulting polarisation of school provision based on educational, social and economic factors is a major issue for many authorities. The weakest schools frequently serve the poorest, most vulnerable and most disaffected groups."

Ofsted says that although LEAs are right to invest heavily in unpopular schools, school closure may sometimes be the best solution "even when the school places are required". In a statement to 0-19 Ofsted elaborates. "For an LEA, maintaining schools with high levels of surplus places is costly and drains resources away from other more successful schools that are oversubscribed. The LEA has a duty to ensure that it provides value for money and has to engage in place reductions to save costs."

What Ofsted does not explain is how children living in poor neighbourhoods can benefit from the closure of their local school. As Devon Alison points out, whichever school they then apply to, they will be competing with children who live closer to the school. So the only schools they will be able to access will be those with surplus places - the least popular ones. At worst, children may drop out of education altogether. On four occasions when Alison has been in local primary school playgrounds to talk to parents about the schools campaign, young teenagers bringing their siblings to school have approached her to ask if she can help them get into a local school. "They want to learn, but they are out of school because they weren't offered a school place which was viable for them."

Brixton parents' campaign for a local secondary school received a boost when Nelson Mandela gave the campaign permission to use his name for a school, and a petition of 1,000 signatures has now been sent to Tony Blair. Devon Alison's own children are still several years off secondary school age, and she is hopeful that they and their friends will have a less stressful and disruptive experience than today's 11 year olds.

"The children here are tortured by the transfer programme, and their chances are being blighted. We can't let this situation continue."

¹ Maurice Galton et al, Transfer and Transitions in the Middle Years of Schooling, DfES, 2003, www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR443.pdf 

² Inspection report, Hackney Local Education Authority, Audit Commission/Ofsted, 2004 www.ofsted.gov.uk/reports/mainreports/1418.pdf

³ The London Challenge: Transforming London Secondary Schools, DfES, 2003

⁴ Trading Places - A Review of the Supply and Allocation of School Places, Audit Commission, 2002

⁵ School Place Planning - The Influence of School Place Planning on Standards and Social Inclusion, Ofsted, 2003