How do schools choose which children to accept?

How do schools choose which children to accept?

Ralph Lucas (Editor, The Good Schools Guide) gives expert video advice on: What kind of admissions criteria might a school apply?; How do schools choose which children to accept?; We don't live in the catchment area of a perfect school, can we still apply? and more...

Within the state system, they have to do it entirely by the book. They will be presented with a list of children who've applied and the information will be there for them to be able to judge whether they fit within their criteria or not. They will have an address attached to them or they will have a letter from a priest or an examination result. They have to go exactly by the book wherein no scope of variation, whatever, there used to be lots of ways around things, but interviews have been banned, there is other selection criteria which was subjective [untillegible] banned. And, now they can't even know whether you've expressed a preference for the school or not. They know its on your list, they know they're on your list, but they don't know whether your their first choice or third choice. So they can't even judge by that, they just have to go by the basic statistics that match against their criteria. So there isn't any selection really, it comes down to it being your choice which strikes me as the right way.