CHILDREN from Blackburn and Darwen look set to have to travel miles to secondary school after being stopped going to their local school by a council policy.

Twenty nine fewer pupils from Lammack Primary School and St James CE School will move on to the nearby Pleckgate School in September, than in 1998, according to council figures revealed today.

And their places will effectively be taken by 29 children currently at St Stephen's CE Primary School and Daisyfield Primary School which are much further away from Pleckgate.

Dozens of parents were today preparing for appeals, which will be heard this week, against decisions to refuse their children places at Pleckgate School. Education director Mark Pattison wrote a letter to this newspaper in April denying that the council was guilty of "social engineering" in shifting children to different parts of the town. And education committee chairman Coun Bill Taylor today said the rules on admissions to schools are "transparent and applied without favour" and added: "no councillors can influence them."

Conservative councillor Sheila Williams today described the situation as "a mess with a capital M."

She said the council criteria on which children should be given preferential entry to a school was based first on whether a brother or sister already attends the school, secondly whether a child has special needs, and only then on how close a child lives to a school.

But the third category, the proximity of a child's home to a secondary school, is muddled by a further complex formula based around judging which children have the least distance to travel to an alternative school to the one geographically closest to them.

Coun Williams said: "It really is quite incredible . We are going to have children criss crossing the borough very early in the mornings to get to schools which are a long way from where they live."

Andrew Cairns, of Rhodes Avenue, is one of the parents who will this week take his case to have his son Paul admitted to Pleckgate School taken to appeal. He said: "It is all well and good the council saying there are no feeder schools but the links between St James CE School and Pleckgate are there for all to see.

"Year five pupils from St James' have activity days at Pleckgate, teachers at Pleckgate work with year six pupils from St James' and teachers from the two schools also work together.

"I have seen several prospectuses where the term feeder school is used, yet the council persists with this policy."

Coun Bill Taylor added: "I understand that three Conservative councillors have been looking at individual cases to try and find faults, but have been unsuccessful.

"We are open to consider any workable alternatives to the current criteria if there is a better option."

He added: "The published allocations criteria for places at secondary schools is the same as it was for Lancashire County Council and has been consulted upon by all school governing bodies which comprise head teachers, teachers and representatives of the local community.

"It does not include any reference to which primary school the child attends, but does include criteria on where the pupils live and whether they have siblings at the school of their choice.

"These criteria are applied to all cases without exemption.

"Everyone who does not receive a place at their first choice school has a right of appeal."

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