Get your news delivered straight to you by 7am - sign up to our new Morning Mail newsletter for FREESee more Daily Mail on Google - save us as a Preferred SourceBy ELIZABETH IVENS FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY Published: 22:02 BST, 4 July 2026 | Updated: 22:18 BST, 4 July 2026
A head of admissions at a top grammar has turned detective to root out affluent and pushy parents trying to cheat genuine candidates out of a school place.With around 1,300 pupils applying for just 150 places a year, Greg Fairchild, of historic Reading School in Berkshire, decided to take a hands-on approach to catching out unscrupulous parents by knocking on doors himself and checking out potentially fake addresses.He says he now drives around the Reading area to check that those who have applied for places at the 900-year-old boys' school really live at the addresses within its catchment area that they have applied from.He told The Mail on Sunday: 'You knock on the front door and ask to see the ten-year-old boy and they say "No, there's no child that lives here".'You ask about the name and it turns out they are the tenant and the landlord has never lived there, but the landlord gets their post delivered there so they can use the address as an address of convenience.'On other occasions we have found people using addresses that might belong to an auntie or another family member.'He believes the 'addresses of convenience' issue has escalated, as some grammars, including Reading, tighten admissions procedures to try and ensure only genuine, bright children from local primary schools win places.Before May's half-term, Mr Fairchild revealed he 'spent an entire day driving around the local area visiting addresses we suspected of being fraudulent ones'. Greg Fairchild has taken matters into his own hands and turned detective to catch parents who are trying to cheat their child to a place at Reading School, Berkshire A picture of Reading School, a historic state grammar school for boys founded in the 12th centurySince launching his investigations – poring over historical admissions data to provide a hit-list of suspicious addresses to visit – Mr Fairchild claims he has found 'plenty' of people who are gaming the system and 'living miles away'.He said if they did not find out applications were fraudulent by the time children had settled at school, it was harder to kick them out 'based on their parents' unethical practices'.He warns that together with the growing blight of 'test tourism' – where hundreds of parents from across the UK apply for places, skewing admissions data and costing the school thousands of pounds – it is 'distorting what should be a fair and transparent process' and giving grist to the mill of the 'anti grammar school lobby'.He said: 'The admissions process is being corrupted, whether maliciously with fraudulent addresses or malignantly with test tourism, when we should be focusing all our resources on our local community.'
