The lottery for a city's secondary school places will continue for at least another year.

A recommendation has been made to keep the system controversially introduced in Brighton and Hove this year without making any changes.

The news has dismayed parents, headteachers and school governors, some of whom called for alterations and others for the scheme to be scrapped.

The families of 2,355 children in the city are still coming to terms with finding out last week how they fared when the first year of allocations using the system were made.

Within a week 30 appeals have been lodged by parents unhappy with their offer. Debate has raged at a national level over whether the scheme is fair.

The Conservatives have pledged to ban lotteries if they are elected to Government.

If voted through by Brighton and Hove City Council's children, families and schools committee the recommendation will mean that next year priority to school places will still be given to children living in catchment areas around them - and in two zones which contain two schools a lottery will be used to decide who gets in to the most popular of the pair.

Paula Sargent, headteacher of Patcham High School, in Ladies Mile Road, Brighton, said she was disappointed the council had not made any changes.

She said: "Our catchment was wrong and it is not the only one. I will be very disappointed if more consideration is not given."

Mrs Sargent's school has been left with a catchment with 30 too few children to fill its places, meaning it will lose funding. The council has tried to fill it with pupils from Portslade and Hove, around five miles away, who have missed out on their own preferred schools.

Mrs Sargent said: "The council said it wanted local children going to local schools and a promotion of social cohesion and social mix. Clearly if they are having to redirect children across the city that puts those three principles out of contention."

Trevor Allen, headteacher of Dorothy Stringer School, said the consultation process used to inform the council recommendation was a disgrace.

He said: "They clearly had no intention of listening to what anyone said. We told them in our reply that the consultation was a disgrace."

Governors from several other schools have complained the consultation took place too early, before the full outcome of this year's allocations was known. The deadline for responses was February 29 but children did not receive their allocation letters until March 4.

The review of the system was set up to investigate whether changes to any of the catchment boundaries would make it any more effective.

Parents said they were angry they were not consulted as the council carried out the consultation.

Mark Bannister, of campaign group Schools 4 Communities, said: "The review they conducted is a bit of a joke.

"In the elections last May the Conservatives came to power in Brighton and Hove on the back of promises to review this system and now they are doing nothing. I don't think they have the courage to actually go ahead and do it because they know it is a can of worms."

Councillor Ted Kemble, deputy lead member for children's services, said: "We said we would look at the outcome and see whether changes needed to be made. From the figures we have the catchment areas have caught and the system has been successful.

"We had concerns about it but they don't appear to have materialised. We will continue to monitor the situation and will conduct another review in a couple of years."

The committee will vote on whether to back the recommendation in a meeting at Hove Town Hall next Monday at 4pm.

They will be asked to agree figures for how many places each school has. The proposals are for Varndean School to take 270 new pupils in 2009, compared with the 300 it took this year. A £2.5million extension is under way to create enough capacity for every child in its joint catchment with Dorothy Stringer.

However this year 27 places were still available after all children in the catchment had been allocated places.

The initial deadline for appeals against allocated places is March 31.

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