The number of London children left without a school
place for this September has been cut after local authorities set
up a shared service that enabled parents to apply to the schools
they wanted electronically.
All 33 London borough councils plus six local authorities on the
outskirts of the capital introduced online schools admissions
systems for the applications process covering the 2007/08 school
year.
Use of the systems meant that more children were awarded a
definite place than in previous years, when the councils announced
the results of the admissions process on 1 March.
When schools started using the system to offer places, some 93%
of children were offered a definite place, compared with fewer than
80% in the previous school year.
The improvement in the number of places offered comes from the
councils sharing information about the number of places they have
available.
Some 77,000 schoolchildren apply for secondary school places in
London every year. Before the shared service was introduced, some
parents were receiving multiple offers from schools in different
boroughs, while others received none.
The 39 local authorities set up the pan-London co-ordinated
admissions system with Wandsworth as the lead council on the
project and Atkins Management Consultants as the project
manager.
An executive board with representatives from all the local
authorities was established to oversee the project. Sutton
borough's chief education officer was appointed chairman of the
board.
Each council implemented one of three local admissions system
from software suppliers Arete Software, Capita Education Services
or Tribal Technology.
The pan-London project team also commissioned Arete to develop a
bespoke application to receive data from each of the local
admissions systems.
When parents began the latest admissions round last September,
they were asked to submit their six schools in order of preference
to their local councils. The councils then fed the data into their
local admissions systems.
Every parent's choices were forwarded to the bespoke
application, which is called the Pan-London Register. Data was
transferred using XML over a secure network connection. The
councils encrypted the data using an application called Tectia from
software supplier SSH.
Councils only have a statutory responsibility to share
information about available school places up until they make the
majority of offers on 1 March.
Admission scheme saves cash
LSE admissions report:
www.lse.ac.uk/collections/CER/pdf/cmp19summary.pdf
Pan-London admissions scheme:
www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/doc.asp?doc=17172
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk