By Andy McCue, 11 March 2005 17:05
NEWS Problems with a new £1.5m pan-London computerised schools admission system have left thousands of schoolchildren in the capital without a secondary school place.
The secondary schools admission project was supposed to allow the 33 London boroughs and seven councils to pool information and co-ordinate the applications process for the capital.
The project is being run by Arete software, which developed a central data hub that draws information from and streams data to the existing software systems used by the local education authorities (LEAs) of the individual boroughs and councils.
For many boroughs the process has gone relatively smoothly but eight using Capita software have had problems connecting to the Arete system, leaving an estimated 2,300 pupils without a confirmed secondary school place for the start of the next academic year.
LEAs in London now face a race against time to allocate all the remaining pupils before the 15 March deadline for parents to accept or reject the choice of school offered.
Capita played down the problems and said only two of its boroughs did not complete the dispatch of admission letters by 2 March.
A statement issued by the company said: "Across London all providers in the run-up to the distribution of admissions letters this year have experienced problems with the quality of data exchanged such as duplications and difficulties due to disparate software systems attempting to communicate with the hub and each other."
Arete did not respond to a request for comment.
Comments
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1. anonymous
Not just London. Buckinghamshire failed to get most letters out on the 1st March. When rung to find out where they were, they were "still stuffing the envelopes".
2. anonymous
I think the problem in Lambeth is that there are not enough secondary school places in the borough. The computerised system has brought to light a partly hidden problem. Children in central Brixton have been told to "try" Croydon or Bromley.
3. Janet Harvey
For how much longer is the tax-paying public going to accept the inefficiency of the computer industry.
Its all excuses but very little accuracy. And it is through and through, from PC world to Northumberland County council. No system seems to fully tested before coming on stream.
J Harvey Northumberland.
4. John Wright
It could be worse, instead of Tory Blur getting the job a Tory might have got the job!
5. anonymous
They need more than just a hub, each school/district needed a new dedicated computer/server so all of the schools computers went through the server, instead of relying on their 'older' computers systems, to connect to the hub. The new server would had all the proper working programs no matter the aging school computer systems configuration.