A new way of allocating primary and nursery school places to children will be adopted by Hertfordshire education authority later this year.

County councillors last week agreed to introduce a ranking system, which it believes will be fairer than the preference system now in place.

The new system, along with a change in the rules regarding siblings attending the same school, will come into use for the next school year.

During consultation in February the council received 4,176 responses from parents, 3,865 of which supported the new ranking method.

Councillor Keith Emsall, the executive member for schools, said: "The parents and schools were overwhelming supportive of the ranking system and so we accepted the change."

Under the old system, parents could identify three schools they would like their child to attend and list them in order of preference.

If a school had enough places for all of its first choice applications it would accept them, otherwise it would apply admission rules to select its quota of new pupils.

With the ranking system parents again identify up to three schools, but each school looks at all the applications it has received against its admission rules.

Each child is then assessed individually and given a place at the school which they satisfy the admission rules for and is highest ranked on their list.

Mr Emsall said: "We were finding children could not get into their second or third choice schools because they were the first choice of others."

The previous sibling rule meant that a child would be given a place at a school if they had a brother or sister there when they applied.

This year a child will be awarded a place a school attended by a sibling only if that sibling would be at the school when they start there.