Thanks to one movement of his New World symphony at an Ernest Read Children's Concert, Dvorak scores 11 and a quarter, pushing Haydn into ninth place with 11.Brahms and Schubert tie with 10 each, but Brahms will do better in 1997, his centenary year. One strange omission: Beethoven's No 2 did not get a single performance.DAVID CHESTERMANChorleywood, Hertfordshire. Ships of state Sir: Edward Heath is not the only former premier to whom a nautical simile has been applied ("After 46 years in Parliament, `old Dreadnought' sets sail for one more battle with the young guns", 1 February). Gladstone, referring to Peel, said that "former prime ministers are like great rafts floating untethered in a harbour". There are many who think that every harbour needs elderly vessels, whether seaworthy or derelict. They are picturesque, lend dignity and keep pilots alert.JOHN MITCHELLLondon SE13. Imagine a town where parents have a wide choice of school. There are two grammar schools, single-sex schools, schools which have opted out of local authority control and even one which has not, for those on the left who object to the rest.

It looks like a place which fulfils every Conservative's parental choice dream In fact, it is a parental nightmare. The town is the London borough of Bromley where Harriet Harman's son, Jo, is in his second term at St Olave's grammar school, and its story is a cautionary tale about the perils of competition in education. The trouble began when one grant-maintained school, Hayes, applied to the Secretary of State for Education for permission to select 25 per cent of its pupils. Last July, the 13 heads of the other schools got together and agreed that they would all select 15 per cent of their pupils to stop Hayes siphoning off the cleverest children. They are not allowed to select more without permission from the Secretary of State.Selection inevitably reduces choice for those who are not selected. But, to make matters worse, all except one of the schools picking 15 per cent set their entrance exams on the same day So parents were forced to choose just one of them. A barrister consulted by the pressure group Campaign for the Advancement of State Education thought this reduced parental choice so drastically that it could be challenged in the courts under the 1980 Education Act, which gives parents the right to express a preference for the school of their choice.Parental problems in Bromley do not end there. Because nearly all the schools have opted out of local authority control, they all have their own admissions procedures: the local authority does not juggle applications for all schools.

A parent wanting to secure a place for a child has to contact each school individually to find out what is happening to that child's application. Easy enough perhaps for a Harman but daunting for a single mother of four with limited time and cash.Nowhere illustrates more clearly than Bromley that the notion of parental choice depends on who you are and where you live. Yet, for politicians, it has become as inescapable as kissing babies. Long the watchword of the Thatcherite Tories, it has been enthusiastically adopted by new Labour. How could it be otherwise as Tony Blair's son, Euan, heads for his opted- out school on the other side of town and Jo boards the train for St Olave's?Blair is right to decide he cannot put the clock back 20 years to the time when local authorities told pupils to go to their local school and most of them obeyed. Two education acts (1980 and 1988) have promoted parents' right to choose the schools they want, regardless of where they live. The courts have decreed that pupils do not even have to attend a school within their own local authority.For some parents there almost certainly is more choice.

The number of Euan Blairs is growing as people shop around in search of the education that best fits their child. A three-year Open University study of parental choice among 6,000 parents to be published soon has found that some local schools are losing out in places where parents have a realistic choice of several schools.So the policy of parental choice has made a difference But the rhetoric far outstrips the reality. While some of those who shop around succeed (Blair and Harman), for many parents the idea of parental choice is a myth. Quite apart from the bewildering patchwork of schools created in places such as Bromley, popular schools are, by definition, oversubscribed and end up choosing their pupils rather than the other way round.Even the Government has had reluctantly to recognise that parental choice is not quite what it seems. The first version of its Parents' Charter had a chapter headed "The Right to Choose," obscuring the fact that the only "right" parents have is to "express a preference". Two years and thousands of failed parental appeals over schooling later, ministers had sensed danger. The same chapter in the second version was headed simply "choosing a school" The right mentioned was "to a place at your local school".

But the words "choice" and "choose" still peppered the pages and parents were told: "Your choice is wider as a result of recent changes."In a recent report, the Audit Commission disagreed. It outlined for the first time the extent of parental discontent about school choice. One in five parents failed to get the secondary school of their choice, it said, and in London the figure rose to half. The Open University study, based on three different areas, suggests that between a quarter and half of all parents do not get what they want. Previous figures about choice were an underestimate, both studies suggest, because they failed to take into account a large body of parents who didn't bother to put down the school they really wanted because they knew they had no chance of getting in.