Surrey Comet readers have backed calls for the borough’s top school to open its doors to more local students.

Figures show Tiffin Girls’ School, ranked the fourth best state school in the country last year, has 335 girls who come from within the borough, compared with 560 from outside.

Now as the school plans to expand its intake by one form of entry from September 2013, the Brag and Central Canbury residents’ associations have called on members to lobby the school to accept more girls from north Kingston.

The campaign follows a Richmond Council consultation on ending its linked school policy, which helped 107 pupils from four north Kingston primaries to attend Grey Court and Teddington schools in 2011.

However, while many students would still be admitted under the proposed replacement home-to-school distance criteria, some parents fear it would become even harder for Kingston children to attend a school near them.

Tiffin Girls’ headteacher Vanessa Ward last week rejected pleas from nearby parents to adjust the admissions criteria to allow more children from the borough to attend.

However, 76 per cent of people who voted in this newspaper’s online poll supported more places for Kingston students at the Richmond Road grammar school.

Commenting on the Surrey Comet website, DB wrote: “Kids should have access to schools within a reasonable distance of their homes.”

However, Dr Katherine Philipson, who lived in Kew but studied at Tiffin Girls’ with her two sisters, said: “We would never have got in there if they had restricted it to Kingston girls.

“Richmond County didn’t appear to have the science base I needed, whereas Tiffin did, so I voted ‘No’.”

The gap is even bigger at Tiffin Boys’, where two-thirds of the 1,059 students are not from Kingston.