A senior councillor has apologised for an email error that meant more than 1,000 parents were not made aware of a ruling on school admissions.
Conservative councillor Alistair McNair asked why no one at Brighton and Hove City Council noticed that emails about a ruling by the Office of the Schools Adjudicator had been returned undelivered.
The email address of each of the intended recipients had been included in the blind carbon copy (BCC) field and the number proved too many.
A resident, Jim Blackwood, submitted a freedom of information (FoI) request through the What Do They Know website asking about the email.
He was initially told that it had been sent out as promised by council leader Bella Sankey and her deputy Jacob Taylor who is responsible for schools admissions.
But he asked for a review to look at how many “bounced back” – and the FoI review found that all 1,156 were returned, with a message stating: “Your message was not delivered to anyone.”
Councillor McNair said: “Why did the council fail to come clean about this failure immediately?
“Why has there been so much contradictory information from the council and why did it have to take a resident FoI to uncover this.”
He also asked if the council would consider rerunning the admissions process, which ended on Friday 31 October.
Parents of children in year 6 were told where they were due to go to secondary school from September on Monday 2 March.
Councillor Taylor said that the council did not want to make operational errors but the bounce-back email was filed away by a different member of staff.
He said: “It was an error and we’re sorry about that. It shouldn’t happen. Parents should get emails.
“So the team responsible is learning from that. The initial response was genuine and honest. They didn’t know that happened at the time and just gave the answer the emails have been sent.”
Councillor Taylor said that the council would not rerun the process because the only changes were to keep the same published admission number (PAN) at Dorothy Stringer and Blatchington Mill schools which were well publicised at the time.
But they all get to carry on and make further mistakes. Sadly this council and certain Councillors get to make mistake after mistake. Cover it up. Say sorry when finally found out. And move on to the next car crash. How can residents of this city trust them? Surely a vote of no confidence must be coming soon!! Or an investigation they can’t run away from.
Human error is hardly a grand deception. We all make mistakes, you’ve made three just in your comment, for example. I wouldn’t be calling for you to be fired over it, because that would be hysterical of me, right?
And in this case, auto replies, like bounce back messages and acknowledgements, can easily get filtered into spam and missed. It’s very common. It’s a weird limitation too that most people would not be aware of, myself included.
I think the problem is that the council education team’s attitude is so defensive. They treat parents like me (year six going to year 7) like the enemy. They are never open and transparent, so parents are forced to investigate and issue FOIs. They impose changes whilst only listening to a subset of stakeholders. This is my experience as a parent, who has completely lost faith in this councils competency and good faith. As far as the email, of course they shouldn’t be sacked but anyone sending 1500 emails must know not to send them as BCC. Or at least check they have been received. And the apology from councillor Taylor comes across as half hearted and grudging.
Why do you think they’re so defensive? the same thing has been playing out for two decades. People in central Brighton vote for a left-wing council and then hit the roof the moment they actually try to implement left-wing school policies. Anything that touches the idea that you buy a house in the right part of town to get into Stringer gets shot down in flames. The council knew opposition was on its way and probably treated the ‘no way’ group as the enemy because, in this context, they were. My guess is that the undeclared aim this time around was to take the shine off Stringer and Blatch by letting in low income and estate kids, hoping that in a few years opposition to evening out the numbers between schools won’t be quite so intense.
Blimey, even I don’t think the council are purposely trying to make some schools worse. I just thought that was an unintended consequence of their changes. I think all people want is a good local school. This council doesn’t seem to think that is a reasonable request. I don’t think it’s about excluding people, that’s why most people supported the free school meal changes. I didn’t vote Labour but I get your point there.
Using Outlook to send a bulk email in 2026? This is ridiculous. It is something that anyone with basic IT knowledge has known to avoid for well over 20 years.
I get that some people may not be aware of the reasons that this is such a bad idea, but why isn’t there some education of those in a position to be communicating important information to the general public and a general policy in place to stop something like this from happening?