Like hundreds of other families on the Sussex coast, the Bournes are counting down the next few weeks, waiting to discover whether they have won “the lottery”. They are guinea pigs in a social and educational experiment in which their children’s schools will be chosen at random.

At the beginning of next month a letter from Brighton and Hove council will arrive, telling the Bournes whether their daughter Emily, 10, will go to the secondary school they favour - or whether she has been allocated, purely by chance, to another school.

Amid vocal protests, Brighton’s local authority last year voted to introduce a system of random selection to allocate places in oversubscribed schools. It is replacing the old rule under which children living closest to the school gates were given preference.

The idea is to prevent the sharp-elbowed middle classes from dominating the best schools by buying up houses in their catchment areas. But many parents are worried that the lottery will arbitrarily condemn their children to a school they do not want.

Emily, 10, has been placed in an area with two schools - Blatchington Mill and Hove Park - and the lottery will probably be used to decide between them. Chris Bourne, an IT consultant, said that Blatchington, the more popular school, was “much higher” up the exam league tables than Hove Park and that most parents would prefer it, as their house-buying habits have proved. However the Bournes favour Hove Park, despite most of Emily’s friends hoping for a place at Blatchington.

“People were moving closer and closer to the popular schools,” said Bourne. “Last year the catchment area of Blatchington Mill went down from 2,500m to 1,500m - just one mile from the school.

“All kinds of shenanigans were going on. Parents were pretending to live at grandma’s house or renting a little flat just to say they were in the area.”

It is a scene that will be familiar to millions of parents across the country. Conversations about school catchment areas are a staple of middle-class dinner parties. Concern about the lengths to which people will go to secure the right school for their offspring is balanced by an acknowledgment that they are only doing what they think is best for their children.

Now the government wants to impose new rules. Last week a report commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families backed lotteries as “an efficient and effective means of allocating places” that would “make access to popular schools fairer”.

At present only a handful of school places in the country are allocated by lottery, but now the practice could become far more widespread.

Why is the educational system apparently turning its back on the long-established use of catchment areas? What will this mean for parents who have been told by successive governments that choice in their child’s education is paramount and how far will the policy spread? THE roots of the new enthusiasm for lotteries lie in the clash of political ideologies: between the principle of choice established under the last Tory government and the social engineering that has come to permeate the new Labour educational agenda.

Until the 1980s, children were usually lumped with their local state school, whatever its quality. The Tories then allowed parents to express a preference for a particular school in their area. In the long term this has meant that some schools - usually those with the best results - have become more popular, while those in rougher areas or languishing at the bottom of league tables have found it hard to fill their places.

It is a two-way process. While parents seek out the best schools, the schools are accused of seeking out the “best” parents, knowing that children with parents who take an active interest in their education tend to get better results. Parents report that informal chats about entering schools have become de facto interviews, even where selection is officially not employed.

“Schools will use whatever opportunities there are to maxi-mise the intake of students who will reflect best on them in the test and GCSE results,” said Professor Stephen Ball of the Institute of Education in London, the author of a new book on education and social class.

Labour, which had pledged to reduce social inequalities through “fair” access to education, decided to act. It started by introducing a new admissions code last year to ensure that top schools do not protect their league table standings by favouring children from middle-class families.

The code bans not only overt selection but also any use of subjective judgment by schools to determine whether a child might fit in. Philip Hunter, an adjudicator, has been appointed to judge appeals by parents who claim schools are breaching the new code. His judgments apply not only to individual cases but are also treated as guidelines for all schools.

Hunter’s viewpoint seems clear. “Parental choice in the market leads to segregation,” he said. “It leads to some schools full of middle-class children and some sink schools.

“Someone will have to judge at what point there should be regulation in this market in order to alleviate segregation happening.”

Among the things he has ruled against are schools requesting children’s birth certificates (in case they look at the occupations of the parents); asking parents why they have chosen the school; and asking them if they support its ethos (both of which are considered unfairly favourable to articulate middle-class parents).

Hunter is expecting a “splurge” of appeals this year about schools failing to follow the code. That in itself is a factor that may increase the use of lotteries, if only because some head teachers see them as a way of avoiding the administrative time and resources used up in disputes over the code.

“There are authorities who have almost insoluble crises with parents’ perceptions about schools,” said John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers.

“Lotteries are a kind of solution of last resort. They allow authorities to say, ‘Look, it’s transparent and fair; you’ve been knocking bits off each other for years and we can’t think of anything else’.”

In many cases it would not be the full lottery that has been introduced in Brighton. Most of the other schemes running in Britain are partial lotteries, whereby a proportion of pupils are selected by ballot. In Hertfordshire’s single-sex schools it is one in six, for example.

Supporters of lotteries point to positive results from research in America. Many charter schools, on which Labour’s city academies are loosely based, require pupils to be selected by random computer choices when oversubscribed. A study of Chicago charter schools by academics at Harvard and Columbia universities found that pupils admitted by lottery outperformed those who came in by other means and that the schools themselves performed better overall.

What impact they will have on Britain’s state schools, with their growing gap between the best and the bog standard, remains to be seen.

While lotteries may appear simple and transparent, they can cause serious practical difficulties for parents, as Ray Ruszczynski, head of Chellaston school in Derbyshire, has found.

Ruszczynski was faced with a glut of applications from the residents of new housing developments. The school’s first attempt to whittle down numbers - by choosing parents living in older houses - was thrown out by Hunter’s office and this year a lottery is being used. But locals have rounded on a system that could separate their children.

“It’s a very good school. If my 10-year-old doesn’t get in due to the lottery system I will be furious,” said Samantha Cholerton, who lives in the same road as the school in a house she bought four years ago.

Even head teachers are not entirely happy with the results of lotteries. Christine Murrell, head of St Albans girls’ school in Hertfordshire, said it was too early to tell what the scheme’s long-term effects would be on her popular and high-achiev-ing school, but some early results were “bizarre”.

“We have children here whose parents would have preferred they had gone to other schools – but at the same time there are children who chose this school first but could not get a place,” said Murrell.

“It isn’t fair, but neither was the old system.”

THE replacement of a system that was flawed but had a logic to it with one that is arbitrary in its application may make school lotteries a good area for the opposition parties to score points against the government.

Middle-class parents will be even more concerned that they are losing control over their educational choices for their children. Fees in the private sector have soared by 41% in the past five years, making good state schools very sought after. “[Lotteries] take away something that parents value - the opportunity to intervene on behalf of their children,” said Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University, a special adviser to the Commons schools select committee. “This is a power the Thatcher government gave them and, whatever politicians say, the genie is out of the bottle.”

This weekend Nick Gibb, the Tory schools spokesman, said he was “totally opposed” to lotteries. “You are just substituting one set of unhappy parents with another,” he said.

“Admissions should be to do with geography, where you live. Okay, parents may move there; that’s just a fact of life. You can’t have a child’s future being determined by the roll of a dice.”

Parents will also be worried by one significant side-effect of lotteries: the possibility that they could put downward pressure on house prices. Hakan Bosati, a partner at Tatlers estate agents in Muswell Hill, north London, said that if a lottery system were introduced for a successful local primary and for Fortismere, the best secondary school in his area, hundreds of thousands of pounds would be knocked off local house prices as properties lost one of their main draws.

“It would knock 10%-20% off straight away,” said Bosati, “which means up to £200,000 for a property near Fortismere. There would be uproar.” Given the importance of house prices to the average Briton, it is an effect that local councillors would do well to consider. They might note that shortly after introducing the lottery system, Labour was voted out of power in Brighton and Hove.

How the school lotteries work

THE system comes into play when there are more applicants living in a defined geographical area than a school has places for, writes Sian Griffiths.

The lucky winners are selected randomly by electronic ballot, with the process supervised by someone independent of the school and education authority.

Lotteries are normally used to supplement other methods of awarding places. Schools still give priority to certain groups, such as children in care or those with brothers or sisters already at the school. The lottery distributes the places left over.

So far, every school has used the method slightly differently. In Brighton the council has divided the city into six districts and families are expected to apply for schools within their district.

Places at oversubscribed schools are then allocated by electronic ballot.

However, at Lady Margaret Church of England school in west London, the first 50 of 90 places are allocated to girls whose families attend Anglican services. Once places have been given to siblings and other priority groups, the rest are allocated by lottery.

Random choice will narrow the grounds for appeal if a child is not awarded a place at the preferred school. It is difficult to claim it is unfair. But parents may still be able to argue, for example, that they should have been given a place under other criteria and not entered for the random process at all.

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