The Big School Lottery - The Choice

Series offering an insight into one of the most important and stressful decisions a family can make - which secondary school to send their child to. With unprecedented and exclusive access, the series follows Birmingham Education Authority, which is the largest in Europe, as it allocates its school places. And it follows a group of children - and their parents - from across Birmingham as they go through the process and make the move from primary to secondary school. This is an intimate and revealing account of modern Britain, which brings to the fore a better understanding of the complexity and difficulty of administering a system that has to balance all the choices and find school places for 16,000 children in this year alone. The first episode introduces five families - in the White family, 10-year-old Thomas would like to go to a more ethnically mixed school; the Khans' daughter Saffiyah is training two hours a day to try to get into the best grammar school; Simone Vassel's son Jamiah is desperate to avoid going to a school where he fears there may be gangs; Ethan Clamp's mum Alison knows he would be certain to get into a school with great sport facilities if only he lived a couple of hundred metres closer to it; and Phoebe McHale lives in the leafy suburbs of Sutton Coldfield and is spoiled for choice with her excellently rated local state comprehensive schools. Cameras follow the hopes and the dreams of the parents as they confront the reality of choice in education and make their selections. They must list six schools in their order of preference but they know they may not get into their first preferences. There is then a tense six-month wait to find out.