The Education Lottery

For years one of the killer criticisms which those who were unhappy with a public service could deploy was the word "lottery." If you were unhappy with geographical variation in service you would refer to a "postcode lottery." If you felt that the quality of service provision offered to different people varied substantially on an arbitraty basis, you would refer to this as a "lottery".

Last week a Labour education authority, Brighton council, agreed to introduce a real lottery to allocate scarce school places.

If any councillor or MP were mad enough to propose that we could allocate school places by auctioning them off to the children whose parents made the highest bid, that proposal would rightly be condemned on all sides as a massive injustice.

Yet how is it any better to allocate places on the random chance of an arbitrary lot, rather than the irrelevant consideration of whose parents have more money?

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