OUTSPOKEN columnist Giles Coren today (Saturday) claimed that his family had been the victims of parents cheating Camden’s admissions system after he failed to get a place for his daughter at the primary school close to his Kentish Town home.

He said he had been forced to go private for his four-year-old's education after being let down for a place at a state school 200 metres away from his house.

In a scathing piece about how parents apply for school places in his weekend column for The Times, Mr Coren suggested that people were temporarily renting properties in catchment areas during the admissions process. He did not name the schools for which his family had applied but said his daughter had been ranked 14th on a waiting list.

Giles Coren lives in Kentish Town

"In theory, there are 43 four-year-olds living between us and the school. Except there aren’t,” Mr Coren wrote. “Do you know how many there are? None. Although maybe five or six on the other side of the school. The rest of those 43 children live in Hampstead and Highgate and Dartmouth Park, with self-righteous lefty parents who quietly rented a room over the hairdresser across the road from the school in the application year. Or one of the nearby bedsits which the landlord lets at astronomical rates to cheating millionaire Labourites who need a local address for their application form.”

Mr Coren lives in a part of Camden which has been at the centre of rows about how school places are handed out, particularly at primary school level, in recent years. 

The New Journal revealed last year that five families had primary school places taken away following investigations by Camden Council into the home addresses used on application forms. Two offers of a place at the UCL Academy  were also removed. The way pupils are accepted for places at the highly sought-after Eleanor Palmer in Kentish Town has been under particular scrutiny in the last two years after a place was withdrawn from one family and several local parents complained that they had unfairly been locked out of accessing the school.

Mr Coren said he had not wanted to send his daughter to a private schools because using them turned you into a "pariah". But he warned that the admissions system had meant state schools were “not ordinary any more" in the way succesful applicants might think.

He said: “They are full of spoilt, rich white kids whose parents, if they have not directly cheated the system to protect their left-wing bragging rights, have spent two million quid buying a house next door.”

And in a message to anybody who had worked the system in the ways he suggested, he added: “You are making local schools selective on income by the back door. And you are destroying the very notion of a local school by coring out catchment areas and then abandoning them.“