Attendance Management Case Study.

Stevenson College Edinburgh

• Improving attendance and cashflow at Stevenson College. Stevenson College is the fifth largest college in Scotland and one of the largest further education institutions in the UK. It has over 15,000 students and turns over £20 million per annum.

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  The college uses Infonic’s Attendance Manager Monitoring system to track the attendance of its students and staff. It also uses Attendance Manager to monitor its Education Maintenance Allowance students.

  Overwhelmed with paper

  Student Attendance tracking is increasingly essential to UK colleges. It enables staff to manage the student population and college funding. Student dropout is a waste of a college’s resources and of the student’s time. Spotting irregular attendance allows these issues to be addressed early. Much of a colleges funding is closely linked to student attendance, monitoring that attendance is crucial.

  Stevenson college staff were aware of the need to upgrade the colleges paper based attendance tracking system. The situation became critical with the introduction of Education Maintenance Allowances. EMAs were introduced to support students from low income families. By 2008, all eligible 16 to 19 year olds on full-time courses will receive an EMA. The allowance is tied to attendance - which the college is expected to monitor.

  Prior to deploying Infonic Attendance Manager, the system assumed that students were attending classes - unless their tutors indicated otherwise. This ad hoc approach did not generate efficient attendance management. It was difficult to check attendance records and to extract information for analysis.

  The old system also employed an inefficient centralised scan and data entry service. Every register had to be physically transported across the college to the scanning office, scanned and then returned. This was time-consuming and ran the risk of lost registers.

  Choosing Attendace Manager

  The decision to deploy Attendance Manager was influenced by the success of the system within another Scottish further education college. In that deployment the college had successfully piloted it Infonic’s software for a campus of over 4000 students. On the basis of that success Attendance Manager was identified as the best solution for Stevenson College.

  “In six months with Attendance Manager the college’s cash flow improved by £60,000. The software paid for itself in the first 12 months of use" said Business Process Manager Ronnie Peacock.

  Benefits of Attendace Manager

  1. Accurate and easy management of attendance
  2. Rapid identification of attendance problems
  3. Significantly reduced administrative errors
  4. Timely management reporting
  5. Reduced paper usage
  6. Reduced manual administration
  7. Acceleration of EMA payments

  “Support from Infonic has always been fast and effective and introducing the system to college staff has been straightforward” says Business Process Manager Ronnie Peacock.

  The Attendace Manager solution

  Used by colleges across the UK, Infonic Attendance Manager is the least expensive, most flexible system available for capturing student and staff attendance.

  The Infonic team has strategic partnerships with the Department of Education & Skills and leading software vendors in the Education market to ensure the solution remains tightly integrated with the MIS, enrolment and timetabling systems.

  Attendance Manager enforces tight security and offers a range of capture methods including paper registers using OCR, direct data entry from tutors’ laptops and Web registration.

  Reports can be configured using a range of criteria and saved for sharing with other users. The system is fully compliant with the Freedom of Information and Data Protection acts.

  The Attendance Manager system provides an accurate picture of college attendance. It allows users to compare attendance figures across campuses, subjects, and lecturers. It makes the registration process easier for lecturers. Students are very aware that their attendance is being monitored.

  The Attendance Manager EMASYS module enables users to automatically upload weekly EMA payment data to the EMASYS system. Saving Stevenson College three days administration per week.

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