THE admissions policy for Swindon's schools is to be revolutionised.

A new education committee called the School Admissions Forum has been set up to look at the town's ongoing problems.

At the moment there are many different admission authorities in Swindon because some schools set their own admission criteria.

This means that parents are forced to fill in several different application forms and find out if the application has been successful from different schools on different dates.

David Williams, head of Kingsdown School, says the forum must get it right or the town's parents, pupils and schools will suffer dearly. He branded it an accident waiting to happen.

But it could help avoid another admissions crisis like the one last year when more than 100 parents of children in West Swindon were turned away from Bradon Forest School.

The parents were wrongly assured by Swindon Council that they would have a place at Greendown in West Swindon or Bradon Forest School in Purton and many were forced to attend Moredon's Hreod Parkway School, which traditionally serves north and not west Swindon.

Mr Williams said: "In an area like Swindon you have community schools that fall into the LEA's process, foundation and voluntary aided schools which have different criteria and schools such as Bradon Forest which is a foundation school in Wiltshire, so has yet more different criteria.

"All of these have their own application forms and inform parents if their children have been successful on different dates so what we are proposing is a single application form.

"My hope is it will be able to deal with the Bradon Forest situation but my concern is that it will not be ready for the target date of September 2004.

"It will mean a foundation school like mine handing over the administration of our admissions to the Local Education Authority, which is an accident waiting to happen."

Mr Williams underlined the scale of the project and stated that if the forum was not convinced it could hit the 2004 target, it should not be pushing for it.

Paul Kohn, chairman of the Swindon Association of Primary Heads, welcomed the new board.

"This is a very sensible idea to try and bring all schools together. Everyone from the foundation schools to the LEA know it," he said.

The forum has been set up in response to the Education Act 2002, which makes it a requirement for all local authorities.