A word that can often strike terror in local government is ‘choice’. It’s something that Labour councillors naturally want to be able to give their constituents; we want them empowered after all, but there are many reasons why local circumstances can make it an unachievable reality. The month of March is when that dreaded ‘choice’ word hits councillors hardest, when parents queue up at advice surgeries, or ring up often fuming, or in tears, because their child hasn’t got a place at the school of their ‘choice’.

Many parents have used the word lottery to describe the reality of ‘school choice’ up until now, because really what they are doing is just expressing a preference. Given that usage of the word lottery, it was perhaps a surprise that we in Brighton and Hove hit the national headlines for days when we introduced a lottery element. The coverage was extensive, demonstrating how stressful parents find the current system and how much they want to talk about that. For us as a council, the publicity was far from exclusively negative, with David Cameron condemning us but the Independent acclaiming us as heroes.

In Brighton and Hove, I doubt if there was ever a golden age when all parents got the school place that they wanted for their children. The most articulate members of the middle classes found some way to get their child into the state schools that were furthest away from any area of deprivation. Many other parents were forced to accept the situation as some natural order – one in which they weren’t allowed to have educational aspirations for their children.

In more recent years, crude league tables woke far more parents up to the idea of chasing headline results. Middle-class and, increasingly, less-well-off families with children approaching secondary school age moved home to be nearer the more popular schools. This played a significant part three years ago in the city council deciding it had to close a school because of falling roles, not just because the middle classes avoided it but because 50 per cent of families living in the neighbouring council estate weren’t choosing it.

In other parts of the city, the council was facing increasing challenges and appeals to its admissions policy. The catchment boundaries for each school were being adjusted every year in an attempt to try and keep children from each community together as they moved to secondary school. The trouble was that the system looked as if it could be subjective rather than objective, and at appeals parents were often successful.

So our city council moved to ‘safe walking distance to school’ as its new admissions criteria – it looked on paper as if it could more or less work on the basis of where families lived at the time. It had plenty of appeal – it was environmentally sustainable, good for child health and keeping communities together. With hindsight, however, we were naïve. As soon as the new system started there were council wards with apparently very few families left living in them – they either moved or rented temporarily to try and get close to the school they wanted.

As parents had gone to so much trouble, and often great expense, to secure the place they wanted, they were even more angry if they didn’t get what they had planned for. The distance catchment areas for the most popular schools shrunk at alarming rates – in the last year alone they nearly halved for the two most popular schools. Those schools became more over-subscribed than ever, with all the rest of our schools being mis-labelled ‘bad’ by some, for simply not being over-subscribed with first choices.

The distance criteria actually left many having to travel further than ever before. If they weren’t near a popular school then they wouldn’t get into it, and so they would have to travel well past it to an under-subscribed school. The downward spiral was quickly looking like a whirlpool, set to drag almost all our schools down, and with social division set to be more pronounced than for many years.

So we were heading in the wrong direction – we knew that the best way to ensure schools do well is if they have a mixed intake. Easily solved if you live in a single-party state and you hand down decisions without political repercussions. Brighton and Hove couldn’t be more different though – a minority Labour administration with Conservatives, Lib Dems, Greens and Independents; not the mixed bag you want to rely on in a difficult situation.

After a huge amount of work with parents, schools and a selection of cross-party councilors, there seemed to be reasonable consensus on a way forward: a desire to keep communities together and keep traveling to a minimum, with large priority fixed-catchments areas for a local, or pair of local schools.

But it’s never that simple in local government: the number of children in any catchment will vary each year and there is a limit to how much you can expand schools to accommodate that. Besides, when there are two schools in a priority catchment area how do you deal with one being more popular than another? A lottery element for over subscription seemed the only reasonable answer. That way, families can still express a preference, there is equality of opportunity for families within that catchment area, and both the popular and the less popular schools get a mixed intake.

Not easy to deliver though. Some of those parents who had already gone to a lot of trouble to choose where they live in relation to a particular school felt penalised by the new council policy. Something that Conservative councillors en masse, with David Cameron pushing them, felt the need to defend. It also presented problems for individual ward councillors of all parties, because the impact wasn’t the same across the city.

If we had gone purely for a lottery for all secondary places across the city, there would have been universal equity, but we couldn’t justify the fragmentation of communities with children in the same street possibly all going to different schools. No matter how good our local buses it doesn’t make sense for children to be traveling at random across the city to school – community connections do matter.

I’m sure lotteries have a lot to offer many places across the country if my supportive mail bag is anything to go by. Introducing such a policy certainly isn’t without pain though – it isn’t for the faint hearted. I’d recommend trying to involve a diverse range of stakeholders, but when parents start to absorb the likely outcomes and the shouting comes from a range of perspectives, don’t expect any consensus to last. By then, though, you should have a sense of direction which you need to follow through – it won’t be possible to please everybody.

The dangers of ducking whether to use a lottery element are high: an over emphasis on popular schools can leave a city or town deeply divided socially – not a Labour vision for the future.

In Brighton and Hove we will of course be watching very closely how our lottery pans out. I wonder whether we will expand its role if it lives up to our hopes by helping some of our less popular schools get a more mixed intake and they then improve. What I hear most commonly now from parents is the relief of not feeling they have to move, that they don’t have to worry about failing as parents if they don’t – surely one of the worst effects of the systems to date. Relieving pressure from parents, and by proxy their children, can be as good as choice for a healthy confident upbringing.