I must congratulate Mark Bannister for his creative interpretation of the recent proposals to change secondary school admissions procedures and his suggestion they would have increased car journeys in the city (Letters, February 28).

Unfortunately, nothing he said had any basis in fact.

These are the facts as I see them:

The current admissions procedures allow parents living in an area with a number of schools to choose to send their children to the furthest away of those schools, increasing pollution.

The proposed changes would have encouraged those parents to choose the school closest to them.

The proposed changes would have allowed parents in a much wider area of the city the possibility of sending their children to their local school.

Under this year's allocation of places, a substantial number of children living in Brunswick and Adelaide, as well as Queen's Park and Hanover, have been given Falmer and Patcham schools rather than their local schools.

As this results in them making a journey of several miles across the city, I struggle to see how Mark Bannister could possibly believe the current arrangements are beneficial for pollution in the city.

-Richard Lindley, Brighton