Online School Admissions

Online School Admissions ... soon to be available in the comfort of your living room direct from your digital TV

Innovating the way in which Birmingham parents and carers can apply for their child's school place, Digital Birmingham, commissioned by Gateway to Educational Services (Dept for Children, Schools & Families) and working with Birmingham's Admissions and Appeals team, aim to enhance the digital channels available to citizens and enable applications for school places to be made from the comfort of their own homes using a technology already familiar to them - Digital Television.

Birmingham City Council currently uses CACI Online School Admission (OSA) software and the project will aim to run a parallel interactive form as a proof of concept development. This will be available through digital tv, which will feed into the admissions back office system, and would increase the availability of OSA in an attempt to support the digital inclusion agenda and address some of the exclusion issues in the region, and wider.

The project has the following advantages:

• Transferable outcomes to all Local Authorities considering a Digital TV access channel for OSA
• Increased availability to OSA and all of its advantages across the digital divide
• Improved take-up and accessibility for Birmingham

Birmingham is currently well positioned to engage in such a project as we already have an iDTV microsite: http://lookinglocal.gov.uk/digitv/cds/birmingham/netgem/home

So the addition of a further channel would be part of a natural development cycle for the resource.

The project involves partnership working between DCSF's Gateway to Education Services and Digital Birmingham, Admissions & Appeals, and suppliers Looking Local, CACI Ltd and Service Birmingham Ltd.

Use of SMS Text Messaging to parents for school offers:
Birmingham brings you another national first and is trailing the use of the SMS Text Messages to inform parents and carers of their school place offers.

The use of emails to inform parents of their allocated place on March 1st has proved to be an incentive to applying online. The use of SMS Texts in a similar way is as yet untested but would seem to have even more attraction as parents/carers will have no need to log-in to receive their allocations.

The aim of the pilot is to take advantage of current technology and provide 100 parents/carers with a fast-track route for receiving the notification of their child's allocated school place. This should be easier and more convenient than logging into an email account. Participating parents and carers, in additional to their email, will also receive a secure text message direct to their mobile phone at the same time, providing them with a direct and more convenient way to find out which school has been allocated.

The project will investigate and pilot the use of SMS Text messaging for allocation notifications and will have the following advantages:

• Documentation of the processes involved in setting up an SMS Text Service for OSA
• Consideration of the implications of using such a system for OSA when offering school places
• Investigation of the potential to improve OSA in the long term
• Enablement of a cost / satisfaction evaluation development for the project area.
• Help bridge the digital divide

The results of the pilot will help central government decide whether to make the option of text notifications nationally available to all parents and carers in the UK.