Nine out of 10 Surrey pupils clueless over school placement
More than 24,000 pupils are today unable to find out where they will be spending their next five years in education.
The Surrey County Council website, informing parents and children which secondary school they are to attend, has crashed.
With a total of 27,000 applications handled each year, nine out of 10 applications were made online.
This is the second year the county council has provided the online service.
The surge in users this morning forced the site to display a 'cannot display' page, suggesting the site was unable to cope with the demand.
A warning or apology to parents and pupils has yet to appear on the council's own website.
Reports of the site not working were received by the Surrey Mirror at 7.51am today. The site had been running from 7am. The site was still not working at 11.15am today.
Last year the county had just 6,200 applications online.
In a press release sent to media organisations in 2008 as the system was launched, Councillor Peter Martin, Surrey County Council's executive member for schools, children and youth services said: "This is a great way to take some of the stress out of the schools admission process."
- Link to the site here
- Are you still waiting to hear about your placement? Did you get the place you wanted? Call the Surrey Mirror on 01737 732088 or the Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser on 01306 886750.
5 Comments
by Parent, Redhill, Surrey
Tuesday, March 09 2010, 2:03PM
“The website actually crashed just after 11pm on Monday 1st March. I tried to get the website up ready to just press refresh in the morning. I tried until gone midnight with no success. During the night when I awoke I tried again and the website was still unavailable. I don't think it was the due to a 7am surge .... unless like me other people were preparing their computers for the morning result!
I also thought the text service I had registered for would text you the result. Unfortunately all the text told you was that you could now log onto the website to find the result! I thought the whole idea of a text would be to ease the number of people accessing the internet.
Unfortunately for some people like myself the post does not arrive until 11am. I therefore had a very anxious child on Tuesday morning who had to wait until the end of school to hear her outcome.
Perhaps next year they should just say that the results will be out that day... rather than making people believe they would know before they went to school.
It is a very stressful time for parents and children alike. Fortunately we were delighted with our outcome, so our frustration was soon replaced with relief.”
by Parent, Redhill, Surrey
Tuesday, March 09 2010, 2:02PM
“The website actually crashed just after 11pm on Monday 1st March. I tried to get the website up ready to just press refresh in the morning. I tried until gone midnight with no success. During the night when I awoke I tried again and the website was still unavailable. I don't think it was the due to a 7am surge .... unless like me other people were preparing their computers for the morning result!
I also thought the text service I had registered for would text you the result. Unfortunately all the text told you was that you could now log onto the website to find the result! I thought the whole idea of a text would be to ease the number of people accessing the internet.
Unfortunately for some people like myself the post does not arrive until 11am. I therefore had a very anxious child on Tuesday morning who had to wait until the end of school to hear her outcome.
Perhaps next year they should just say that the results will be out that day... rather than making people believe they would know before they went to school.
It is a very stressful time for parents and children alike. Fortunately we were delighted with our outcome, so our frustration was soon replaced with relief.”
by Negative, Kroydonistan
Thursday, March 04 2010, 2:44PM
“That's all right. The kids won't be able to get to school anyway when the council withdraw all the bus services..”
by Parent, Merstham
Tuesday, March 02 2010, 6:38PM
“So the website crashed, even the best ones do sometimes. I applied on-line and still got a letter and e-mail confirming my daughter got her first choice of school this morning.”
by Julie Steel, Staines, Surrey
Tuesday, March 02 2010, 9:52AM
“Clearly SCC knew how many people had applied online when we all did in October - why did they not expect all the applicants to try and find out this way and make proper arrangements with their website! Don't they realise the pressure we as parents are already under with school places without spending 2 hours trying to access a website that is not available!”