Your child's school may be chosen by an objective function

Under a proposal now with a regional school authority, the placement algorithm would be published in full: the terms, the weights, the tie-breaks, everything. A child's school would be shown for what it is under the model — the output of three weighted terms, named in the draft as travel time, social mixing, and a variable called institutional stability.

The first two explain themselves at a parents' evening. The third does not. Institutional stability keeps class numbers viable across the district, which in the plainest available wording means that some children would be placed where they are needed rather than where they live closest. The draft does not use that wording. It uses the word balance, nine times.

Publication would work exactly as intended for about a week. Then a parent would build a calculator. You enter an address, it returns the term that rejected you. The authority's own helpline would end up linking to it, on the grounds that it is more accurate than the leaflet and answers faster.

“The weights existed before we printed them,” a spokesperson for the authority would say. “They used to sit inside a committee's judgement, where nobody could see them and nobody could appeal them. We accept that they were easier to live with there. We do not accept that this is an argument for putting them back.”

This is the part nobody modelled. Bad luck is survivable; a decision that was never about your child is harder. Disappointment needs a story, and an objective function supplies arithmetic instead. The complaints that arrived would not be about fairness. They would be about the third decimal place, and they would be right about the third decimal place.

Appeals would change shape too. A published formula converts every appeal into a technical dispute about inputs — was the travel time measured by road or on foot, was the sibling flag set. A parent who argues that their child would simply be happier at the other school would receive a courteous reply explaining that happiness is not among the terms.

The authority would consider withdrawing the publication and then discover that it cannot. Weights cannot be un-seen. Anyone who has read the formula once will read every future decision through it, including the ones made by a human being on a Tuesday afternoon for reasons that were never written down at all.