LONDON - The government warned state-funded schools on Thursday to abide by strict admissions rules introduced last year to stop covert selection of pupils.

Schools Minister Jim Knight said there had been 79 breaches of the code, which bars interviewing of applicants or asking for family details which could weed out poorer children.

"Hundreds of thousands of children have a fair chance of getting into a school of their choice," he said.

"But I am very concerned that formal complaints and other anecdotal evidence suggest that some local authorities and schools are not complying with the law."

He said the government was introducing a beefed up appeals process for parents who fail to get their children into their preferred school.

The new system would be more independent and ensure that parents were properly advised over the procedures, he said.

The tougher admissions code was introduced in the Education and Inspections Act 2006 to ease fears that greater freedoms given to schools would lead them to exclude hard-to-teach pupils from deprived areas.

It required England's 23,000 state schools to abide by the admissions rules - previously schools only had to have "regard" to them.

The Labour government promised there would be no more selection of pupils when it came to power in 1997, but it has allowed the existing 160 state-funded grammar schools to continue selective admissions.

The code does not cover fee-paying independent schools, which educate just 7 percent of pupils.