When Pauline Patrick had to tell her daughter that she wouldn’t be starting at her chosen school in Brighton in the autumn with her friends, 11-year-old Chloe’s response added to the anxiety her mother was already feeling.

“She came home from school the day the letter arrived and asked, ‘Did I get in?’,” says Patrick. “I had to say no and she just broke down, crying, ‘Why me, Why me?’ I kept saying to her that we would appeal against the decision and we would win. But what if we don’t win? What will we do then?”

The Patrick family’s experience was replicated all over the country on the so-called “national offer day” earlier this month. Some families logged on after midnight to discover their child’s fate; others waited for the envelope to drop through the letterbox. One way or another there was a lot of bad news: one in five families – 100,000 children – had missed out on their first choice of school place.

Government ministers promptly admitted that many parents would feel “let down” by the system and urged them to make a case to local appeals panels.

But the thousands of families now caught in this predicament know that the chances of persuading a panel to throw open the gates of an oversubscribed school is stacked against them: two out of three appeals fail. So parents now face weeks of worry searching for alternatives to the sink schools that many have been offered.

With one-sixth of Britain’s 3,000 secondary schools turning in appalling GCSE results, it is clear that there are simply not enough good schools to go round. National offer day 2008 seems to have condemned thousands of children to scrappy qualifications and a second-class life – at the age of 11.

Patrick, however, refused to be felled by the bad news. Within hours of learning the decision, she had shot off a letter to the appeals panel. She is now waiting for a date for a hearing where she will try to persuade them why her daughter should be given a place at Hove Park, a school close to the family’s home.

Instead, Chloe has been offered a place at a school several miles away, which means taking two long and, her mother says, unsafe bus journeys across the city twice a day. At this school, fewer than one in four children (23%) got five good GCSEs last summer.

In Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, dozens of parents have been left out in the cold because the Tiffin girls’ school, the local grammar, accepts children from all over the country who pass the tough entrance exam, leaving local families scraping around.

Among them is Tamsin McNicol’s 10-year-old daughter Xanthe. She was turned down at her first four choices and offered a place only at her fifth – a school in the neighbouring borough of Richmond, which was until recently failing badly.

“It’s bonkers,” says McNicol. “The grammar school is two minutes from our home, but there are children applying from Yorkshire. Some pupils travel two hours each way to go there.”

Her daughter was a whisker away from achieving the marks to get a place, but lost out to children with higher marks who could be living at the other end of the country.

McNicol and other parents are campaigning for a new secondary school to be built in the north of Kingston, but in the meantime she is left high and dry.

“I’m worried because I don’t think the school Xanthe has been offered a place at is the right school for her,” says McNicol. “It is undersubscribed because it used to be a failing school.”

She is appealing for a place at Tiffin girls, and will be writing to Ed Balls, the schools secretary, to point out just how unfair she feels the system is. However, McNicol’s situation, to quote Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen, is “luxury” compared with that of Louis Modell, who has nowhere to go in September.

Louis was a Blair baby, born in February 1997 – three months before Tony Blair was elected – with the words “education, education, education” ringing in his ears. Eleven years on, Louis doesn’t know what he will do in September after he finishes at Lauriston school in east London – ironically a primary that Gordon Brown singled out for praise in his 2007 Labour conference speech. And Louis’s situation is by no means unique: he is one of 14 children out of 30 in his year 6 class in the same position.

His father, David Modell, a documentary film-maker, has lived in Hackney for 13 years with his girlfriend Madeleine. The couple have two younger children in local primary schools.

Louis applied for six secondary school places – the only three in Hackney that his father said “he had a cat in hell’s chance” of getting into, two schools in a neighbouring borough to hedge his bets, and one last-chance saloon: a school in Ingatestone in Essex, a 40-minute train journey away.

With no offers so far, Louis has as yet no hope of any – the best the trust that runs education in Hackney could come up with was a suggestion that he consider home schooling.

“We did everything we were asked to do. We were not picky – so when you get that letter saying you haven’t got a place anywhere, it’s shocking,” says

Modell. “This year it’s like carnage – all these kids and parents are walking around stunned.”

Three families, three unhappy unsettled children. Over the next few weeks they and their parents will have their lives turned upside down as they write letters, wait by the phone, attend appeal hearings and cross their fingers.

Will Chloe avoid having to catch four buses a day? Will Xanthe be allowed to go to a better school closer to home where her friends go? And will Louis have a chance to go to school at all? Questions that, 11 years on, the Blair generation feel they should not be having to ask.

For information on how to appeal, see www.schoolappeals.org.uk

Got a similar story? Go to www.timesonline.co.uk/alphamummyto share your experience

Your next step

Your first step must be an appeal. You will need to prove either that the admissions criteria have been applied incorrectly or that your child has a special reason to attend the school you chose. Vague emotional arguments will get you nowhere. If, for example, you think that the school has got it wrong and that you do live in its catchment area, measure the distance from your front gate inch by inch.

If your appeal fails, you have three options.

The first is to abandon the state and educate your child privately. Read the inspection reports and study the exam results. Not every private school is worth its fees. Visit any school which looks possible. Interview the head, but remember that if the school is popular this will be a two-way conversation. He will want to know why you think this is the right school for your child, so do your homework.

A second possibility is home tuition. Many parents worry that children educated at home will miss out on the social side of schooling. However, if you find others who have chosen home tuition you may be able to share tutors so that some learning can be undertaken in a group. Do not underestimate, though, the personal commitment needed – this is not an option for the part-time parent.

Neither is the final option, which is to send your child to the school you have been allocated, join the governing body and work from within to improve things. Governors can make a difference quickly, but they have to be prepared to tackle underperforming staff. See if you can find other desperate parents willing to put in the effort. If you can, you may be able to create a school that offers a decent education.

Chris Woodhead

Explore Education

• Schools

• A Level & GCSE Results

• Good University Guide

• Sunday Times University Guide

• Student

Times recommends

• 8-minute lessons boost pupils' GCSE grades
• Intensive tuition proves cure for illiteracy
• The new laws of student unrest