Every child can be a lottery winner

The lottery system to allocate places at Brighton and Hove's secondary schools has been surrounded in confusion.

The title created the image of every child having their name put into a hat and being drawn out at random to be dispatched to any of the nine schools across the city.

It has prompted anxiety among parents across the country who fear their own areas will adopt the system, which has been endorsed by national education leaders.

The reality in Brighton and Hove is significantly different.

The lottery has not divided pupils among nine schools. There were no names drawn out of a hat or balls distributed by a machine.

Most of the dividing has been done by catchment areas introduced last March amid protests.

The lottery, a computer programme, has been responsible only for dividing children between two pairs of schools which share joint catchment areas.

It has decided who will gain places at the more popular of each set of two schools and who will be allocated to the other.

More than 900 children will have their school place decided this way, which means more than 300 will miss out on their first choice in these areas alone. The system has caused concern for parents who have had to wait until today to find out whether their child has been a "winner" or "loser" in the system.

It will provide issues for schools as well.

In Hove the system has paired Blatchington Mill and Hove Park.

Blatchington Mill, which has had better results in recent years, will no longer take its pupils from the immediate surrounding area, while Hove Park will take fewer pupils from the length and breadth of the city but will have to deal with being considered the second choice in the catchment.

The headteachers of both schools have insisted there is no need for parents to worry.

Tim Barclay, of Hove Park, explained: "For the past five years we have worked together more and more as schools, driving towards improvement for both rather than competing to set one apart from the other."

Janet Felkin, headteacher of Blatchington Mill, said: "Our schools collaborate in many ways.

Hove Park is a specialist in languages, so we send some of our pupils to classes they run that we do not have the resources for.

"While we will always want to maintain individual identities and characters for our schools, we will work together to make education in Hove the best it can be. Each school will feel and look different."

The heads said schools would always welcome and do their best for every child which came to them, regardless of where they lived, but added they felt it was better for the pupils themselves not to have long journeys.

Mrs Felkin added: "People must bear in mind an infrastructure review is being carried out, so bus routes will be changed to make journeys simpler."

Hove Park, like Varndean School in the other joint catchment in Brighton, is in the unenviable position of expecting a large number of pupils whose families will not have picked it as first choice.

"Mr Barclay said this was not something which would cause problems for the school and it would nurture relationships with pupils and their families.

He said: "We want people to be happy with the school they are in.

"The link between the learner, their family and the school is hugely important in making positive steps towards their success."

One of the concerns which the schools were unsure about was the effect of children being separated from their primary school friends by the lottery.

Mr Barclay added: "In primary schools you are in one group all day every day, you stay in the same classroom most of the time.

"In secondaries there is a lot of moving around and children make different friends as they do so."

Is the lottery system the fairest way of allocating school places?