HUNDREDS of parents who do not like the secondary schools their children have been allocated face a possible four month struggle to try to get things changed.

Panels are now hearing appeals from people either annoyed their child has not got into a grammar school or annoyed because the school is not the one they want.

All parents had to fill in a form stating which schools they wanted their children to attend and send it back to the Local Education Authority (LEA), Buckinghamshire County Council. People were asked to state their first, second and third choices.

According to Mike Appleyard, the county council cabinet member for schools, 90 per cent of parents get their children into their first, second or third choice.

But that still leaves hundreds who do not and who are likely to appeal.

Of more than 2,000 children selected for a grammar school, about 45 have not been allocated a first, second or third choice school. They have been told they must go to Sir Henry Floyd Grammar School in Aylesbury, a school which had about 50 spare places once parental preferences were allocated.

In addition there will be about 200 parents appealing against their child's failure to get a grammar school place. About a quarter will be successful.

Then, of about 4,200 children due to start at the county's upper schools in September, about 250 failed to get the place they wanted.

The Free Press has already highlighted problems at Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow, where there is not enough room for everyone who got the required 121 points in the 11-plus and wanted it as their first choice school.

In effect the pass mark for first preference children to get into the school has gone up to as high as 130 to get the numbers to fit.

Remaining parents then found their children could not get places at nearby grammar schools like The Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe because those schools were already full with first choice children.

Last year, after 15 appeals, five children from Marlow ended up at Chesham High School. This year's grammar school surplus of 25 children face a home to school trip of about 25 miles to Aylesbury.

Cllr Appleyard said part of the problem was that governors insisted on keeping the school's catchment area. This goes over the county boundary and 40 to 50 children from out of county have been offered places. Governors could reduce the problem by restricting the catchment area to Buckinghamshire, he said.

He said even so there were close enough the right number of grammar school places in the county for those who qualified.

He said: "But some of them are in the wrong place. We are trying to allocate pupils to the closest appropriate school. But we have to work within the law."

He said the number would reduce as the appeals process went on. Parents in Slough, which is in a different LEA but also has grammar schools, can apply to both LEAs, giving them two first preferences and two allocations. Some Slough children would eventually go to a Slough school, said Cllr Appleyard.

He added that the LEA was talking to all the grammar schools to see whether they could fit more children in.

"Parents think it should be easy, but this is not the reality," he said.

Parental choice is not just a Marlow or grammar school problem.

Upper school parents are equally annoyed when they find their children are allocated precisely the school they did not want.

There are four upper schools in the county with spare spaces; Cressex and Hatters Lane in High Wycombe, and Quarrendon and Mandeville in Aylesbury.

Hatters Lane serves Micklefield and Cressex serves Castlefield the two most deprived areas in the county.

Parents talk and read Ofsted reports and a school gets a bad name which may or may not be justified. Parents pick a school perceived as more desirable in a better area but so does everyone else.

Cllr Appleyard is trying to find out how many parents in the two Wycombe schools' catchment areas deliberately chose to send their child somewhere else. Hatters Lane was in special measures at the bottom of the county's schools' GCSE results table last summer with 15 per cent getting five grades A to C. But Cllr Appleyard said the school, which is being re-launched as Highcrest in September, was improving under the new head. It has gaps for 20 to 25 pupils in its intake of 120.

Cressex, where 27 per cent of pupils got five or more grades A to C, has spaces for another 20 children in its intake of 160.