Once upon a time, time used to be Christian. As the Church re-civilised Europe after the barbarian invasions and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, it also re-shaped the calendar. It re-founded the date on the Saviour’s supposed birthday, moulded the months around its major festivals, and fitted our now familiar academic year between Christmas, Easter and the year’s agricultural duties.

Not so long ago, Lent, Whitsun and Advent meant something to the majority of people in Britain. Today, Lent is curiosity, Whitsun a mystery, and Advent a frenzy of over-consumption. Only Easter remains. Just.

Whilst the feasts and fasts may have faded, however, the educational year remains. This is most obvious in the three main terms, still sometimes called Michaelmas, Hilary (or Epiphany) and Trinity. But it is also increasingly evident in those more modern festivals: the exam season, a wilderness period of temptation and testing; exam time, a brief week or so of agony and passion; the post-exam period, that age of “realised eschatology”, where the work has been finished yet the results remain unveiled; and Results Day, when we discover whether our name has been written into the book of life.

To this collection, we might now add National Offer Day, when the whole saga begins, and schools’ admissions decisions are announced.

This is a traumatic time. Those sending forth their young disciples worry, as do those (not necessarily different people) who wish to see a fair society, free of social segregation and wasted potential.

Alas, there is rather too much social segregation and wasted potential today. According to recent media coverage, we are witnessing the emergence of “a school system deeply divided by social class”. The combination of current school admissions practice and parental choice is, we are told, “fuelling segregation”.

The whole “problem” is that parents do whatever they think will be best for their children. In a few ugly cases, that means deception and subterfuge – false addresses, rented flats, lying about religion. For others, who can afford it, it means moving into an area with a good school. And for others who cannot, it means making do with what’s left.

Put this way, the system seems obviously unfair. Why should little Samantha be barred from a good school simply because her dad is a nurse, whilst little Sam is guaranteed one because his dad works in the City.

Few deny that the problem of social segregation is a real one. Even those strange individuals who wish to retain particular cultural or religious allegiances, in an age when such attachments are viewed with some suspicion, recognise that ghettoising society, especially along socio-economic lines, is bad for everyone. The debate, therefore, lies in how to resolve it.

One idea of recent years, first implemented in Brighton and Hove, is that of admissions lotteries. These are not quite as random as we sometimes think. It is not the case, for example, that all places are allocated by lottery. In Brighton’s case the city is divided into six catchments, with pupils expected to attend a school in their area. In catchments where there are too many applicants for certain schools, places are allocated by random ballot. In other words, limited lottery rather than pure proximity is used, and then only in cases of over-subscription.

It seems like a good idea. Not only is it just – justice is supposed to be blind and you don’t get much more blind than a lottery draw – but it is also socially cohesive, mixing together children irrespective of their socio-economic background. Who could object to that? Indeed, in a culture fed a diet of scheming middle-class parents playing the system, whilst hate-mongering “faith” schools greedily cream off the rich kids, who would dare object?

As so often, however, it is between the idea and the reality that the shadow falls. The admissions lottery has serious problems. Firstly, the system pays (even) less attention to parental choice than the current one, a fact that, it should be acknowledged, might anathematise it for some but is an irrelevance for others.

Second, it leaves some children, even when they live next door to school A, having to travel across town to school B, while others travel in the opposite direction: hardly desirable from anyone’s point of view, not least the planet’s.

Most seriously, the lottery system seems unlikely to solve the very problem it sets out to address. Indeed, it may make it worse.

When parents who find themselves in the great educational draw are told that not only can their child not go to their preferred school but must, instead, attend one that is not only unsought after but also at the other end of town, what do you think will happen? Those parents who might otherwise have accepted their second or third choice, and can afford to, will go private. Their child’s circle will be even more socio-economically limited, and the whole, well-meaning attempt at securing equality and cohesion will in fact do the opposite.

Initial reports, following the 2008 National Offer Day, suggest that this is precisely what has happened. Private schools in lottery areas have reported a surge in applications. In Brighton and Hove, for example, independent schools reported increases in applications of up to 44%.

Those on the right are liable to use such arguments to bury the admissions lottery once and for all. Yet, to do so without acknowledging the problems of a system based solely on parental choice and location is disingenuous.

Quite apart from the fact that the rhetoric of choice is somewhat exaggerated - local authorities on average fail to respect the first preference of one in five applicants, and in some cases that rises to one in two – choice is not the panacea some claim.

Perhaps, were it exercised by moral agents who were wholly rational, charitable and far-sighted, and in a system of accurate and complete information signals, choice would be all we needed. But we are not those people and we do not operate in that system.

Instead some people care more about their children’s education than others; some people work harder than others; some people earn more than others; some people have more children than others; some people need more help navigating the system than others.

The result, as with any market-based system, is that some benefit while others suffer. That would not be a problem if everyone who benefited or suffered deserved to. But they don’t. Which child asks to be born to parents who, if still around, care little for its abilities, education or future?

Simply accepting the market solution and leaving it at that would be to acquiesce to its implicit moral judgement, which Christians should not do. Adjusting and amending the market’s adjudication, however difficult and unsatisfactory that may be, is a Christian duty.

Although generally dismissive of Christianity, George Orwell uttered a profound truth of Christian moral thinking when he wrote, in his 1948 essay Writers and Leviathan, “in politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser”.

That is unpalatably true with our current education system. We face a choice between a system that honours the integrity of the family, and respects our need and ability to determine our future, but appears to guarantee a degree of social segregation; and one that recognises the injustice built into the current system, and determines to fight for those many of whom find themselves socially disempowered and excluded but, in trying to foster equality and cohesion, threatens even greater segregation.

Whichever position we adopt in this debate will depend on our deep-held values: theological, cultural, political, educational. Or so I thought, until I opened my own daughter’s admissions letter last week.