Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Letter from Dr Ian Birnbaum, Chair, Pan-London Secondary Schools Admissions Project to the Chairman of the Committee (SA 53)

LONDON SCHOOLS ADMISSIONS SYSTEM

  I noted with interest the report in last weekend's Observer (No 10 insider fuels school selection row, 29/02/04). You will recall that when I was invited to present evidence to the Select Committee I was keen to point out that the outcomes of co-ordinated admissions to secondary schools across London are, in the context of the committee's wide-ranging inquiry into schools admissions, limited. Nevertheless, they are very beneficial.

  As you will recall, the aim of the London Schools Admissions System is to make the admissions system fairer by giving all parents the single best offer of a place in a preferred school on the same day. It will lead to more parents getting a preferred school earlier with fewer getting no offer at all. The new system will be simpler for parents, easier to manage and reduce the workload for schools, because far fewer parents will drop out after offers are made.

  I was disappointed, therefore, to see that the article painted the system as one rife with risk—a view I appreciate that committee members may have taken from Dr Philip Hunter.

  I thought, therefore, that I would take the opportunity to update you on the progress of London's co-ordinated system. I am delighted to say that all 33 London boroughs and eight education authorities surrounding the capital have now signed up to the scheme and all of its core elements. I am also pleased to report that the development of the technology that will allow us to speedily and efficiently transfer information about applicants between the participating authorities is going well and on schedule. Of course, any system like this is dependant more on people—the politicians, admissions officers, school based staff and, to some extent, parents themselves—than it is on technology. But the technology will be an enormous help, though, like all such systems, it carries an element of risk. Because of this, we are putting in place a number of safeguards to minimise the risk and maximise the benefits.

  The key thing that clearly we have to avoid is a situation where on 1 March offers are not made. There are three situations which could cause this—only one of which involves the technology. We have designed the system to avoid all three, and it might be helpful if I set these out here.

  The first risk is that a local authority fails to share the basic information about who has applied where to neighbouring authorities. This is actually a legal requirement so will have to happen nationally anyway. However, because in London we have put together a communications structure which makes it as easy as possible for this information to be shared, it is actually much less likely to be a problem in London . . . And to minimise the risk factor, we have set the deadline for sharing this information (which is mid-November) relatively early so that there will be time to chase up any authorities that have not relayed the information by the agreed date.

  The second risk is that an authority will fail to share the information about the potential offers it can make with other LEAs. We have designed the system and constructed the admissions scheme in such a way that the impact of this would be minimised. All that would happen is that the Pan-London system would remove that LEA from the sifting process which eliminates all multiple offers. Offers would still be made on 1 March but the LEA which has been excluded would need to make the offers itself. This would mean that there would be some multiple offers but still far fewer than if we weren't operating the system at all. This situation would in fact be no different to the one that will occur in most of the rest of the country where coordination will be much more limited.

  The third risk is that the computer system might fail. In order to reduce this risk we are making use of the London Grid for Learning infrastructure which is well developed and well respected—indeed the Grid has been chosen to be the new Regional Aggregation Body for the whole of London. We are also putting in place replacement servers which could be enlisted in, we think, the unlikely event that the existing system breaks down. Moreover, as each local system is freestanding and sourced from a variety of suppliers, it is highly unlikely that all could fail. We are also convinced that we have built in enough time for the final sifting process to allow us to recover if any breakdowns occur.

  I hope this reassures you and your Committee that we have taken very seriously the risks involved and that we have minimised the possibility of things going wrong. We remain convinced that the system will offer significant benefits to parents and children in providing more offers earlier and avoiding the anxiety we know occurs when a child is made no offer at all. We also feel it will benefit schools in giving them much more reliable information earlier about their cohort.

  Finally, I would like to give you advance notice of a launch event for our funders—the ODPM—and other interested parties—schools, suppliers, local politicians and project partners that we will be holding on Tuesday 22 June.

5 March 2004





 
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