A senior councillor has apologised for an email error that meant more than 1,000 parents were not made aware of a ruling on school admissions.
Conservative councillor Alistair McNair asked why no one at Brighton and Hove City Council noticed that emails about a ruling by the Office of the Schools Adjudicator had been returned undelivered.
The email address of each of the intended recipients had been included in the blind carbon copy (BCC) field and the number proved too many.
A resident, Jim Blackwood, submitted a freedom of information (FoI) request through the What Do They Know website asking about the email.
He was initially told that it had been sent out as promised by council leader Bella Sankey and her deputy Jacob Taylor who is responsible for schools admissions.
But he asked for a review to look at how many “bounced back” – and the FoI review found that all 1,156 were returned, with a message stating: “Your message was not delivered to anyone.”
Councillor McNair said: “Why did the council fail to come clean about this failure immediately?
“Why has there been so much contradictory information from the council and why did it have to take a resident FoI to uncover this.”
He also asked if the council would consider rerunning the admissions process, which ended on Friday 31 October.
Parents of children in year 6 were told where they were due to go to secondary school from September on Monday 2 March.
Councillor Taylor said that the council did not want to make operational errors but the bounce-back email was filed away by a different member of staff.
He said: “It was an error and we’re sorry about that. It shouldn’t happen. Parents should get emails.
“So the team responsible is learning from that. The initial response was genuine and honest. They didn’t know that happened at the time and just gave the answer the emails have been sent.”
Councillor Taylor said that the council would not rerun the process because the only changes were to keep the same published admission number (PAN) at Dorothy Stringer and Blatchington Mill schools which were well publicised at the time.