It gets worse…
The other day I wrote about how Surrey County Council had a “problem with their systems” and couldn’t tell us what school our daughter has a place in. We were supposed to be informed last Wednesday. They’d promised to “send the letters out” on Friday, today. Being impatient I rang them up; now the letters have been printed surely the relevent data would be available to give out on the phone to impatient parents.
Well yes and no.
Yes we should be able to give you the information I was told, but sorry we can’t. “Our database has crashed!”
I’m incredulous.
“It’s the EMS” I was told, “I can’t even log in to it. Today of all days”.
Is this Capita’s Extended Management System? Capita, the company whose chairman gave a £1m loan to the labour party? Suddenly, (much to my shock and surprise) the Tories are becoming ever more attractive. Partciularly with the Shadow Chancellor standing up and demanding a greater use of Open Source. As a tax payer this is great news! And as employee of a great company that champions Open Source even better!
I’m exercising my democratic rights next week and talking to my (Tory) MP about the farcical IT “solution” that is operating in his constituency, and will back up what his parties money man is saying. And maybe my voting intentions may be swinging.
Hi,
We are suffering from the same problem with Surrey but don’t hold your breath for the letter. When ours arrived saying our daughter had not got into our chosen school,it was correctly addressed to our house in Surrey including the right postcode, but we were informed in the letter from Surrey that we were ‘Out-County residents’ and therefore needed to apply to out Local Authority to get a school place allocated for our daughter (our local authority being… oh yes Surrey !) To add to this we were told we had a right to appeal but that appeals were highly unlikely to be upheld in the 4-7 age group where the school already has 30 pupils in a class due to govmt guidelines – not unreasonable one would think except our daughter is 7 and applying for a 7-11 age group ! So I guess if they think her sge is 4 (even though they correctly quoted her date of birth in the letter) and that she lives in a different county it is no wonder they haven’t offered her a place at the local Surrey school for 7-11 year olds. Still one benefit of this ridiculus process is that as we are clearly not Surrey residents in their eyes we obviously won’t have to pay them any more community charge ! I feel we are about to experience the nightmare of the appeals process.