Hundreds of parents are considering sending their children to private school after plans to allocate state school places by lottery were introduced in Brighton this week.

Richard Cairns, the head of Brighton College, said that the £14,500-a-year school had been overwhelmed with interest for places for pupils aged 11 to 18.

The sudden interest in private education came as about 600,000 parents across the country waited for letters from councils telling them whether their children had achieved places at their preferred schools.

Most recent government figures show that in the past 90,000 of pupils, or 15 per cent, did not get their first choices. This year, early figures obtained by The Times indicate that 25 per cent have not been given their first choice.

The increased interest in Brighton College followed Brighton and Hove City Council’s announcement that it would allocate places at oversubscribed state schools by lottery from next year.

Many parents oppose the decision, which is designed to be fairer to children from poorer homes and stop middle-class families buying their way into the best secondaries by moving into high-performing school catchment areas.

“There has been a significant rise in interest from parents with children in state primary schools, virtually all of whom expressed deep concern about the council’s recent changes,” Mr Cairns said.

Brighton College and Roedean are the two top schools in Brighton and Hove, with 64 per cent pupils gaining A*/A at GCSE. This compares with the next best state schools, Dorothy Stringer school, where 20 per cent get the same grades, and Blatchington Mill school, where the number falls to 19 per cent.

Ministers back the use of a lottery system as an option available to schools in the Government’s new mandatory school admissions code. It is hoped that this will prevent schools using a type of “backdoor selection” and picking the best students, based on ability and social background.

However, academics say that moving to a lottery system may not be any fairer to children from poorer homes. Research from the University of Newcastle suggests that attending a school farther from the home is not an option for poor families, who do not have the cars or the time to drive children to school. Middle-class families were far more likely to have the resources to take up the places allocated in a school lottery system.

Helen Jarvis, who led the study, said: “Our research suggests that lotteries of oversubscribed school places would produce the worst of both worlds: greater educational polarisation and longer, more environmentally damaging car journeys to distant schools by middle-class parents.

“It is interesting that in Brighton a Labour-controlled authority is proposing such a system on the grounds of fairness and equality of opportunity, while our research suggests that it may have exactly the opposite result.”

Times Recommends

• Charles blazes trail as sun king
• Thalidomiders win payout 50 years on
• Libel gag on talk of 'medical hurricane'