14- 19, keeping track when students move around!
A continuing trend in education is the need to support 14 - 19 choice, and to achieve this schools join consortia to improve the range of courses on offer. This presents two problems: How do you move them around? How do you know where the student is?
The first is still awaiting an answer, often involving taxis and minibuses at considerable cost to the school. The latter point may now have an answer. According to the Guardian Education supplement (9th Sept 2008) Edexcel are recommending that schools deploy Collaborative Learning Manager software developed specifically to address those needs by Perspective UK.
The web based software monitors the students attendance and notifies schools instantly if an unauthorised absence occurs, and is already used in Leicester, Stafford, Bromley, Isle of Wight, Nottingham, Birmingham, Islington, Rotherham and Oldham. Once the register is taken at the host location, results are immediately sent back to the school office. The software can also be used to monitor and track individual student progress.
It is unusual for an organisation such as Edexcel to recommend any product, so one suspects they are convinced of its efficacy. A competing product in this space is Capita's Partnership Xchange, the market for which was tested by EIS in a recent letter to secondary schools. The Capita SIMS product remains at the proof of concept stage, with a number of SIMS partner schools evaluating.