An investigation has revealed that a bulk message dispatched to guardians regarding school enrolment did not reach hundreds of families.
Approximately 1,100 parents were anticipating communication about Brighton and Hove City Council’s alterations to school admissions for the upcoming September term, arriving during the application deadline period the previous October.
A examination of a freedom of information request concerning the missing correspondence was released on Thursday, March 5.
The investigation established that the message reached no recipients whatsoever because the council’s electronic mail system imposed a 500-address cap on dispatches, while the mailing list contained 1,156 contacts.
The correspondence outlined the schools adjudicator’s ruling against reducing pupil numbers at Blatchington Mill in Hove and Dorothy Stringer in Brighton, following objections from campaign organisations to modifications in the admissions criteria.
Parents were still in the process of submitting secondary school applications for their children when the ruling was issued on Monday, October 20 the previous year.
Hundreds of messages failed to reach guardians
In response to the initial freedom of information inquiry submitted in November through the What Do They Know platform by Jim Blackwood, the council indicated it had distributed 1,156 messages regarding the decision to parents who had sought places for their children prior to Sunday, October 19.
The freedom of information reply incorporated an image displaying numerous redacted electronic addresses within the blind carbon copy section of the message as demonstration.
Mr Blackwood requested a review of this response, including whether any messages had been rejected. The review findings indicated that 656 messages were not delivered.
However, the response documentation contained an electronic message stating the message was not delivered to anyone, alongside 120 pages of non-delivery notifications.
When initially questioned about the failure to deliver messages to parents, Brighton and Hove City Council stated in February that it took seriously reports that certain families had not received the communication.
In a statement issued on March 11, the council indicated it had remained unaware that the messages had not reached parents until the review was concluded.
One parent, Natasha Priest, had approached the Local Democracy Reporting Service as one of those awaiting the communication. She expressed that the council should acknowledge its error.
She noted that this was not merely a technical problem. Parents were making significant choices regarding their children’s secondary education and the council had assured families on two occasions that it had contacted over a thousand households.
In reality, it had contacted nobody. Its freedom of information replies had been inaccurate.
The council needed to own up, apologise to parents and thoroughly examine what went wrong to prevent recurrence.
Green councillor Sue Shanks observed that the council had committed a fundamental error that should have been identified immediately.
She noted that parents who had already submitted applications for school places ought to have been informed when something material changed, indicating they had clearly been failed by the council.
Most troubling was that the council had not been transparent about this error when it first came to light.
The administration needed to explain why a freedom of information request, responded to months late after repeated requests, had been necessary to expose this problem.
Conservative group leader Alistair McNair demanded an investigation to determine what other messages might not be reaching residents on additional matters.
He questioned how the council could remain unaware that hundreds of messages had not been received. If they had realised, why had the error not been corrected? This situation would prove difficult for anyone who uses electronic mail to accept.
The council claimed it was transitioning to new software with a fresh admissions portal that would reduce human error. He expressed doubt that any electronic mail system could completely eliminate human error.
Admissions arrangements had altered each recent year, generating increased uncertainty among parents. Communication required clarity, which clearly was not happening.
Brighton and Hove City Council stated that the bounce-back notification from certain addresses had been overlooked at the time and only emerged during the internal review.
Prior to the internal review, it had been believed that the messages had reached all parents.
The practice of distributing bulk electronic communications via blind carbon copy was not a standard approach for conveying school admissions information and would not be employed in future.
The council was implementing new admissions software during the summer, which possessed the capability to dispatch messages related to school admissions.