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.
I’m not saying they’ll be any worse. I’m saying they might lose their shine now they’re letting in more poor kids and Stringer is the Whitehawk school. Parents might stop losing the plot every time the council suggests a catchment change. My kids went to Patcham. Good school but you should have seen the state of people when catchments came in and Patcham kids couldn’t get into Stringer anymore.
I think JW does make a good point. Council officers across multiple departments do get defensive very quickly. I suspect it’s a learnt behaviour. There have been plenty of times I’ve witnessed people get very… spicy… in their language on many issues; becoming accusatory, performative, and conspiratorial. Not that it is always bad faith, mind. As has been mentioned on this topic, parents are looking to ensure their children have a good education, and that heat comes from that positive desire.
Unfortunately, there are also a lot who like to be adversarial for the sake of it, and that’s even before you throw in party politics.
As for the technology…my email clients can handle 2,000 BCC easily, although for a bulk like that, I’d really be using something like Mailchimp. Had enough mailing lists get spammed with everyone’s autoreplies and OoO messages because someone replied to all, so I can absolutely see how that could happen. So maybe the lesson here is that some learning around communication needs to happen as a reaction?
Mistakes happen. Although when sending an email, that had been publicly promised by councillors several times, to more than 1000 people you would have thought someone might want to check the message has left the system.
But in this case, when they have investigated they claimed it had been sent to many parents. The council also said the same in response to previous press stories. Even yesterday in the council meeting Councillor Taylor was still saying ‘some’ emails hadn’t been sent. Which he claims is ‘clear’ – but I think we can all tell the difference between ‘some’ and ‘none’.
Basic errors shouldn’t happen – but repeated cover-ups and downplaying of the seriousness of this is the real issue here.
But I’m glad that they have finally used the word ‘sorry’ as that was sadly missing in previous council responses.
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?
Certainly points to a need to modernise their systems.
So in summary.
Councillor Taylor grudgingly apologised but didn’t really mean it.
The Councl uses outdated systems.
School Admssions don’t actually know what they are doing.
Certain schools don’t want the estate kids.
Council officers are very defensive.
We should except this all to happen again in the next council/ admissions/ Councillor Taylor/ Council Officers fiasco.
And when this council get voted out we will be back here again with the new council who will of course blame the old council.
Nah, representations in council actually said Cllr Taylor has been very engaged. We already knew the council uses outdated systems, which is why there are budget lines and goals to improve them. More accurately, getting schools in the right place is going to take several more years, almost certainly with the consideration of LA MATs and spaces not reflecting the replenishment ratios in BHCC.
And the cycle of using the previous group as a scapegoat is a tradition that has been used globally for centuries, lol!