Enter the single word “schools” into Google and three of the first four entries that you are likely to get will offer you online directories of schools’ names and addresses. I say ‘you are likely to get’ because Google seems to have an occasional ability to change its results quite radically – perhaps I should say, ‘this is the result it has been giving for the last couple of weeks.’

One of these directories is run by the state – the Schools Finder service from Direct Gov www.schoolsfinder.direct.gov.uk The other two are private operations, run by retailers of mailing lists. One of these www.schools.co.uk is run by my firm and the other by one of our rivals – The Schools Web Directory www.schoolswebdirectory.co.uk. This is all very fine, except for one particular problem – the government’s Schools Finder listing is full of errors!

Take for example a small town near me, Oundle in Northamptonshire. Search Schools Finder for Oundle and you get 100 schools, a plainly ludicrous result for a town of just 5000 inhabitants. It then becomes clear that you can refine the search a little – so we set the search to “within 3 miles of Oundle” and we get one result for secondary schools – another complete nonsense. There are two secondary schools, one private and one local authority. There is also a middle school which ought to be listed, but isn’t. Worse, on checking the entry for Oundle School (a 500-year old public school) we read that it takes pupils aged 10 to 16. More nonsense, it goes to 18, as any check of A level results will show and to make matters worse it gives the wrong address.

Now I know that some of this is technical nit-picking, but there are similar problems throughout the site. What’s even more annoying was that in a spirit of co-operation I have used the “tell us what you think” button several times to point out errors, and they simply don’t ever get corrected.

When the Centre for Procurement Performance was announced as the body whose aim is to save billions from the education budget by getting schools and colleges to administer themselves more efficiently, I came up with a bright idea. My suggestion was that the DCSF (or DfES as it then was) could ‘tell the schools’ about our www.schools.co.uk website’ particularly as parents already use our site to find schools in their area. Our website has a link from the schools’ names and addresses to their websites, which oddly the official government site does not). By allowing parents to immediately jump from our site to the school’s could be a great way to save some of the money they currently spend on writing, printing and distributing their school prospectuses.

In my letter I even gave a sensible financial case for such a move. ‘If each school in the country sent out ten prospectuses less a year, because the parents had been encouraged to read the prospectus online, then the saving in postage and printing would be around £500,000. And that doesn’t include the time taken by administrators in answering the phone, taking down addresses, and packing up the prospectus. Nor, given that we have maps of every school on our site, the saving in giving people directions to the school.’

As you can tell I was getting quite excited, there would be a benefit to my company, but the biggest benefit by far would have been the significant financial savings to schools – and indirectly to parents in terms of getting the information they were looking for. Unfortunately, the Centre for Procurement Performance were by no means so excited. They rejected my offer on the grounds that the government has its own website. ‘But it is inaccurate and doesn’t link to the school websites,’ I wrote. Unsurprisingly, they wouldn’t budge.

Now our site has most of the school website links, but not all of them, often because schools change their websites from time to time yet the government’s own site that is riddled with errors won’t even contemplate suggesting that schools double check the web link on our site.

So there we are; the DCSF’s own internal body tasked with saving money and trying to achieve the Gershorn targets so dear to Gordon Brown, won’t actually do anything simply on the grounds that they have a website that doesn’t do what our website does.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

www.hamilton-house.com