Has getting your children into a good state secondary ever felt like a lottery? Well if you live in Brighton and Hove, from next year it really will be.

After a deeply divisive battle, a council committee voted last night on a system that creates a patchwork of catchment areas across the seaside city with an "electronic ballot" as back-up when schools are oversubscribed.

The Labour-run council says that the system will give every child the chance to go to a local school and will be fairer to pupils from poorer families who cannot compete in the housing market. In the past, the final tranche of places have been given to those who live nearest to their chosen schools.

The decision makes Brighton and Hove City Council the first in the country to take advantage of the Government's new school admissions code, which states: “Random allocation can widen access to schools for those unable to afford to buy houses near to favoured schools and create greater social equity.”

Labour councillor Pat Hawkes, whose casting vote pushed the proposals through, said: “No school admissions system can make 100 per cent of parents happy, but I believe strongly that this new system will be fairer to more people than the current one.”

But many parents disagree - especially those whose links to good local schools have been cut and now face a choice either between their new allocated school or a better performing school three or four miles away.

Critics of the scheme say that far from reducing the number of dissatisfied parents, it will in fact see an increase in costly and lengthy appeals to the city's education authority and force many parents to drive their children across town. Some schools face being oversubscribed by parents within their own catchment areas, meaning that even families living close by could lose out.

The fact that the city has a hung council - currently run by Labour with support from the Liberal Democrats and occasionally the Greens - has also been thrown into the mix. Both Labour and the Greens sacked councillors from the key committee to push the proposals through.

Those parents who have most clearly benefited from the catchment reorganisation are those from areas of central Brighton where the council wards are disputed between Labour and the Greens - leading to an accusation that middle-class 'muesli eaters' have skewed the result.

Tracy-Ann Ross, a Brighton parent who has campaigned against the proposals, says that she will probably end up driving her son half-way across the city to his fifth-closest school when he reaches secondary school age.

She pointed out today that far from increasing the social mix of the city's most deprived secondary, Falmer High School which lies in the Downs in East Brighton, the proportion of children entitled to free school meals at Falmer will actually rise - meaning that the city's poorest wards have been effectively "ringfenced".

The new government code advises schools that lotteries are a good way to allocate places fairly when popular schools are oversubscribed when parents list their preferences under rules introduced by Labour to guarantee parental choice.

In Brighton and Hove, as elsewhere, parents have been forced to buy their way into good schools by moving into the neighbourhood. The problem has been exacerbated by the closure two years ago of an under-performing East Brighton 'specialist college' - which has not been replaced - and the fact that some of the most sought-after comprehensives are clustered together.

In the next few days, a million families across the country are due to find out whether their children have been allocated places in their first-choice schools. An estimated 200,000 are expected to miss out.

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