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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