“Families leave and that compounds the problem because someone else moves into their rental property,” she said. Ms Binnion said the department's enrolment policy should be changed to state that families are expected to remain in strict enrolment zones for the entirety of their child’s education, unless extenuating circumstances prevent them from doing so. “It’s something we struggle with,” she said. Brighton Secondary College principal Richard Minack said another solution might be giving principals more powers to review enrolments based on a student’s residence.

Loading He said families should have to explain why they have moved out of the zone and provide grounds as to why their child's enrolment should continue. “We continue to experience a situation where people produce documents to prove they are in the zone and then a relatively short time later, sometimes six months, they are no longer in the zone," he said. "Sometimes they are returning to residential addresses they were previously located at.” Mr Minack said the issue was difficult to resolve, because once a child was enrolled at a school they were entitled to remain there.

He said schools had a responsibility to look after the wellbeing of students, and it would be unfair to withdraw an enrolment once a student had started at a school. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: “If they have established a whole lot of social connections you couldn’t say, ‘because your parents have dodged the system you have to go'." The Age revealed last week that the Education Department was reviewing every state school zone and principals would be given greater power to limit their enrolments. It's understood that as part of the department's consultation with stakeholders, principals raised concerns about families moving in and out of school zones to secure enrolments.

But the review will not address the issue and will instead focus on redrawing boundaries to fix anomalies such as students being zoned to two schools or no school at all. A new website will also be created to make it easier for parents to see which school they are zoned to. Principals are not critical of families who move out of school zones for legitimate reasons but choose to keep their child enrolled at the same school. These reasons might include parents separating and needing to sell the family home or accepting a job on the other side of town. An Education Department spokeswoman said that if a family moves house, a child already enrolled in a school can remain at that school. “Every Victorian student has a right to enrol at their local government school,” she said.

She said schools may ask parents to complete a statutory declaration confirming they are living at the address and that the arrangement is genuine and intends to be permanent. But one principal, who did not want to be named, said these declarations were not worth the paper they were written on. Australian Principals Federation president Julie Podbury said some parents were “defrauding a process that was designed to be fair and equitable”. “I think the process of moving into a school to gain an enrolment, and then out, is unfair and unreasonable,” she said. She said the situation placed a burden on the child, who often ended up travelling great distances to attend school.