A mass email sent out to parents on school admissions failed to go out to hundreds of parents, a review has found.
More than 1,000 parents were expecting an email detailing a decision on Brighton and Hove City Council’s changes to school admissions for this September in the week before the deadline for applications last October.
A review of a freedom of information (FoI) request about the lack of an email was published on Thursday 5 March.
It said that the email was not delivered to anyone because the council’s email system limited the sending of messages to 500 addresses – and 1,156 recipients were on the list.
The email set out the decision of the schools adjudicator not to cut the admission numbers at Blatchington Mill, in Hove, and Dorothy Stringer, in Brighton, after a challenge by campaign groups to changes to the admissions criteria.
Parents were still applying for secondary school places for their children when the decision was published on Monday 20 October last year.
In response to the original FoI request on the What Do They Know website, submitted in November by Jim Blackwood, the council said that it sent out 1,156 emails about the decision to parents who had applied for places for the children before Sunday 19 October.
The FoI response included an image showing hundreds of redacted email addresses in the blind carbon copy (BCC) field on the email by way of illustration.
Mr Blackwood asked for a review of this response including whether any emails had bounced back. The review response said that 656 emails were not delivered.
But the response document included an email stating “your message was not delivered to anyone” and 120 pages of undelivered email alerts.
When first challenged about the lack of emails to parents, Brighton and Hove City Council said in February: “We do take seriously reports that some families did not receive it.”
In a statement yesterday (Wednesday 11 March), the council said that it had not known the emails had not reached parents until the review was completed.
One mother, Natasha Priest, had contacted the Local Democracy Reporting Service as one of the parents who was waiting for the email. She said that the council should “hold its hands up”.
She said: “This wasn’t just a technical glitch. Parents were making life‑changing decisions about their children’s secondary schools and the council told us – twice – that it had emailed over a thousand families.
“In reality, it emailed no one. Their freedom of information responses were misleading.
“The council really need to hold their hands up, apologise to parents and look seriously at what went wrong to make sure it never happens again.”
Green councillor Sue Shanks said that the council had made a basic mistake which should have been caught immediately.
Councillor Shanks said: “Parents who have already submitted applications for school places deserve to be informed when something significant changes so have clearly been let-down here.
“What’s most disappointing is that the council were not up front about this mistake when it was first discovered.
“The administration needs to explain why it took a freedom of information request – which was responded to months late after much prompting – in order for this error to come to light.”
Conservative group leader Alistair McNair called for an inquiry to establish what other emails are not being received by residents on other issues.
Councillor McNair said: “How could the council not know hundreds of emails had not been received? If they did realise, why wasn’t the mistake rectified? This situation will be hard to believe for anyone who uses email.
“The council states it is moving to a new software system with a new admissions portal ‘which will mitigate against … human error’. I doubt any email system can remove human error entirely.
“Every year recently, the admissions arrangements have changed and it is leading to greater confusion among parents. Communication must be clear. It obviously isn’t.”
Brighton and Hove City Council said: “The email bouncing back from some addresses was missed at the time and only came to light as a result of an internal review.
“Until the internal review was conducted, it was thought that the emails had been sent to all parents.
“The method of sending bulk emails using bcc is not a standard way of communicating school admissions information and this method will not be used in the future.
“We are moving to new admissions software in the summer and the new software has the functionality to send emails relating to school admissions.”
The statement from the council is, yet again, completely inaccurate. The council did not identify that the email hadn’t gone out following ‘a review’. In their last freedom of information response (from 5 March) they were still claiming it had gone to 500 of the 1100 parents it was supposed to go to. Even while attaching the document that clearly said the email hadn’t gone to any recipients.
It also appears that the council have an issue saying sorry when they make an error. Something that they have still failed to do in this case.