AMID the row over allocation of school places in Blackburn, the upholding of more than half of the 40 appeals by parents against their children being refused admission to Pleckgate High School surely signifies that the system is in need of urgent reform.

For in the same breath that these verdicts are announced, it is stated that the new unitary council's education authority did nothing wrong in its screening of applications - it had followed the procedure to the letter and it was no different from that used by its predecessor, the County Council.

And yet in 23 out of 40 cases, the original decision is reversed.

This means that, while the procedure may be correct, its consequences may often not be right.

But this is more than a bureaucratic contradiction or complication.

Lives are being messed about with by a system that is patently flawed - and this is underlined by the fact that such a high level of appeals being allowed is, we are told, "normal."

It may be that the independent appeals panel has more scope for flexibility than education officials glued to rules that are more rigid for them, but is this not where the flaw lies?

The procedure needs to be made more flexible at the first stage and fed a dose of common sense - so that scores of children are not expected to travel to schools much further from homes, lose their friends and have their safety jeopardised. And for all the influence of increased parental choice on the availability of school places - particularly at one whose results intensify demand - the restoration of the "feeder" school principle, directing local children to local schools and bolstering their "community" structure, should be a key aspect of the reforms that are evidently needed, particularly when so much distress, subsequently shown to be unnecessary, is being caused by a system that is purportedly fair and correct.

It needs to be changed now - so that, next year and in future, we no longer have the perverse 'normality' of dozens of families having anguish forced on them through their children being callously treated more as commodities than persons.

And the remark of one father - that if he treated people in his business in the way the education department had treated these parents, he would be out of a job - eloquently expresses its failings.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.