St Helens Council

Traditionally, authorities often allocate school places and transport provision by postcode. When disputes arise, council staff often resort to trundle wheels to measure the exact distance between a child’s home and school.

When St Helens Council wanted to ensure their admissions and transport policies were as fair and as easy to manage as possible, they turned to One Admissions and One Transport from Capita One.

By linking pupil address information in One with GIS, St Helens can automatically determine which children live in school catchment areas. Home-to-school distances can be instantly calculated via roads and footpaths and visually represented on maps to enable the council to allocate school places consistently.

Staff can check routes are safe, paved and well lit, whilst colour coding on maps allow them to see at a glance whether a route that a school transport vehicle takes has a vacancy.
Batch measurements of data measurement can be processed in less than one hour, a massive improvement on five working days under the old system.

Read the full St Helens Council case study.