Putting your school on the map

Your school can carry a location: an address and a pin. It is set on your school's details by a School Admin, and like everything else about your own record it is yours rather than City Council's.

Setting it

Type the address and press Search. The site looks it up and puts a pin where it thinks the school is. Drag the pin if it is on the wrong side of the road, which it often is for a site with a long drive.

You can also type the two coordinate figures directly if you have them from somewhere authoritative.

It works without a map

Search is an ordinary form submission that the server answers, so it works with scripting switched off: you get the fields, their values and the address, and the pin is set. The buttons that only make sense with a script — "put the pin in the middle", "remove the pin" — do not appear at all when there is no script to run them.

The map is an improvement on the two number fields and never a replacement for them. Nothing on this site is decided by a pin.

Removing it

Clear both coordinate fields. That removes the pin rather than moving it: a half-filled pair is read as no location, and both fields are written or neither. There is a good reason — the coordinates 0,0 are a real place in the Gulf of Guinea, so a school treated as "not set means zero" would be drawn off the coast of Ghana.

What it is for

• Somebody delivering to you can see where you are rather than reading a postcode into a phone.
• A course venue near you is easier to recognise on a map than in a list of addresses. See putting a course on the map.

If there is no map

City Council can switch maps off entirely, and some do. Every address, every venue and every journey through the site works exactly the same without them: what you lose is a picture, not a capability.

Privacy

An address typed here is looked up through City Council's own server rather than by your browser, so the lookup service is never told who was looking. Answers are cached, including the ones that found nothing.