School Admission Scenario

Every year, millions of parents applied for school places in primary and secondary schools for their children in the UK. Predominantly, automated school application systems are employed by local education authorities to help manage the great number of applications, match parents' school preferences (up to three) against a wide variety of ranking criteria set by individual schools, and allocate available school places according to such criteria. School allocation decisions are communicated to the parents, informing which school their children are to be admitted to, with little information on the individual circumstance of a child that influenced the decision. Understandably, parents who do not get their first choices are keen to understand the reason why, typically resulting in a huge volume of calls and inquiries from dissatisfied parents following the National Offer Day. In this scenario, in collaboration with the School Admission team at a local council, we employ PLEAD Explanation Assistant to produce school decision letters that are tailored to the individual circumstances of a school application to help parents understand better why their children are allocated to a particular school.

In this scenario, a parent or guardian applies for a secondary school place for their child, submitting up to three preferences. The application will then be ranked against applications to the same schools, according to the schools' admission criteria. Based on such rankings and the schools' admission capacity, a place will be allocated to the child and a letter explaining the decision will be sent to the parent/guardian.