The story was too juicy not to share, and the person who told it to me had heard it from two others. The scene: the gates of the area’s most oversubscribed state secondary school, known locally as an Oxbridge funnel. Here, I was told, two parents had got into a stand-up row, with parent A berating parent B for having dobbed her into the school after she lied about living inside its tiny, prohibitively expensive catchment area. Parent A’s child had promptly been ejected from Year 7. What’s more, according to gossip, the dispute had begun when parent B outed herself as the snitch.
The truth, once I tracked it down, was a little less dramatic. There was no direct confrontation, but the child had indeed been removed, and the family was indeed not living in the catchment on the date needed by the application. But not through deliberate deception – they were renting there, but between submitting the application and term starting, the landlord had prematurely ended their lease.
