I like the idea of a national school lottery. Every year, on the first Saturday night of March, parents could huddle around their television set, nibbling their fingernails, tense with hope and anxiety.

The drums would roll, the lights would flash... and out the little ball would shoot into the waiting hands of Abi Titmuss, poised in pert expectation.

"And the next place at Greyfriars Comp goes to...." More drums, more flashes, more parental hands snatching at stress balls and tequila bottles... "Little Tommy Tucker of 14 Grudge Street! Well done, Tommy! And the best of luck!"

Or, if this doesn't appeal so much, perhaps we could have the pictures of all kids in a catchment area pinned on a giant rotating dartboard, with a blindfolded Atomic Kitten taking wild stabs at it inbetween spinning round on a broom.

Or, alternatively, have a giant game of snakes and ladders, with the good schools at the top and the bad ones (you know, the ones with knife arches and kids with trousers to their knees and boxers to their neck) curled around the snakes' tails.

Or, perhaps, we could just line the sprogs up with coconuts on their heads and have a monkey throw bananas at them - whoever's coconut is left intact at the end gets first place in the good school queue.

Or, if this doesn't work, we could sit the parents in a Channel 4 studio with Noel Edmonds and let them gamble on their child's educational future with a disembodied voice at the end of an illuminous red telephone.

Or - my personal favourite - we could sketch a giant grid in the middle of a field, write the names of each school in each box, and fire the littl'uns into the grid from a series of human canons. Whichever box the child falls into will be his or her school of choice - pending appeal, of course.

Ok ok, so it's unlikely the Government will bring in any of these strategies in the immediate future - at least, not until the next General Election is over, with the current stigma surrounding human canons and child safety etc - but none of them are a world away from the options currently available to us re school admissions policy.

The problem with the current system employed by the majority of councils, as I understand it, is that middle-class, better-off parents tend to cough up a load of dosh to live next to the best schools, leaving the hoi polloi to fight over the dregs in the Comecon tenement blocks down the road.

Because most schools have proximity as one of their main criteria, children living closest to the schools will have preference over those on the outskirts, giving the Burberry-clad elite an implicit advantage over the baggy-trousered masses.

And if the house-hogging technique doesn't work, there's lots of other avenues available to the more proactive of parents - such as finding God (to get into the best religious schools), teaching bad spelling (to claim dyslexia), or keeping their kids in small cages while feeding them raisins and poking them with wooden spoons (to claim they've been abused - at least one school has this as a criteria).

The main viable alternative to this system, with its corruption-rich criteria, seems to be the lottery system. This at first glance seems much fairer - and in a way it is. All parents who apply, regardless of location, religion, and propensity towards child cruelty, will be judged equally, with pupils effectively pulled out of a hat to decide who goes to which school.

So far so marvellous. Fair, egalitarian and handy for halting the house-price boom.

It would also prevent schools from enacting their own dodgy practices for snaring the richer pupils, such as insisting on uniforms crafted from the finest Venetian silk, or asking subtle questions to parents along the lines of: "So will your son want a free bus pass or will he generally be chauffeur driven to school in a Limousine with LSD wing-doors?"

There is a rub, however: geography. Because proximity would no longer be a criteria for admission, some children would end up having to travel miles to get to school, making it harder for their families to have a personal relationship with the school, and adding to the ol' carbon footprint.

There's also a strong chance they will lose touch with a number of their primary school friends, as there's no guarantee that the whole group will get to go to the same place.

These are important issues which should not be overlooked. Studying within walking distance of home can make school-life a lot more fun, allowing children to socialise more, take part in after-school activities and get home before dark (while also giving them more opportunity to hang around at corner shops smoking dope and setting smaller kids alight... but let's not get into that now).

So what is the answer? Well, I don't know. Nobody seems to, to be honest. But the lottery system does seem the better and more democratic of two evils - while also giving the ITV an opportunity for a much-needed boost to its ratings on Saturday night.

Perhaps the best solution would be to re-draw the catchment areas - as they used to be, before "open enrollment" was introduced in 1988, whereby parents could apply to any school they wanted in the country - and only allow parents inside that catchment area to apply. The area would be large enough to prevent rich families hogging all the houses, but small enough to prevent hour-long bus journeys at the end of each day... and every child would be selected by anonymous ballot (unless they had a sibling already at the school - the only valid alternative criteria, in my view).

Or maybe we could just make all our schools a bit better, and then no-one would miss out. But even my dodgy state school education tells me not to be so stupid to suggest that.