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A university admissions officer has taken on the role of investigator to uncover wealthy and demanding parents attempting to deceive genuine students out of a spot at the school.

Approximately 1,300 students apply each year for only 150 spots, so Greg Fairchild from the historic Reading School in Berkshire opted to personally visit homes to expose dishonest parents by verifying questionable addresses.

He mentions that he currently drives through the Reading region to verify that individuals who have applied for spots at the 900-year-old boys’ school actually reside at the addresses within its designated catchment area from which they applied.

He said to The Mail on Sunday: “You go to the front door and request to meet the ten-year-old boy, and they respond, ‘No, there is no child living here.’”

You inquire about the name, and it turns out they are the tenant, while the landlord has never resided there. However, the landlord receives their mail there, allowing them to use the address as a convenient mailing address.

On different occasions, we have encountered individuals using addresses that could belong to an aunt or another relative.

He thinks the problem of “addresses of convenience” has worsened, as certain schools, including Reading, are tightening their enrollment processes to ensure only authentic, high-achieving students from nearby primary schools secure spots.

Prior to May’s half-term, Mr Fairchild stated he ‘spent a full day traveling through the local area checking out addresses we thought might be fake’.

After starting his inquiries—reviewing historical enrollment records to create a list of questionable locations to check—Mr. Fairchild states he has discovered “many” individuals who are exploiting the system and “residing far away.”

He mentioned that if they failed to identify fraudulent applications by the time children were enrolled in school, it became more difficult to remove them “due to their parents’ unethical behavior.”

He cautions that along with the increasing prevalence of ‘test tourism’ – where hundreds of parents from throughout the UK apply for spots, influencing enrollment statistics and costing the school thousands of pounds – it is ‘twisting what should be a fair and open process’ and providing fuel for the ‘anti grammar school movement’.

He stated: “The admissions procedure is being compromised, either through intentional use of fake addresses or through harmful practices like test tourism, when we ought to be directing all our efforts toward our local community.”

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