Case Study – Tolworth Girls School, Kingston upon Thames

Size: 1,100 + Students Year 7-11
System in place for: All year groups
Since: 2005/06 Academic Year

Tolworth Girls School agreed to be used as a pilot school back in 2005 after a successful small scale test in their associated sixth form college (TCCE). Initially we rolled the system out to a single year group to ensure things would run smoothly and staff would be comfortable with operating the system. Following a smooth transition from their pre-existing system for that year group we implemented the system across the entire school one term later.

Since then, through constant communication with staff members the system has improved and developed and become a firm fixture at the school. Staff enjoy the benefits of a web based system and regularly comment on how simple it is to use. Within the school it has helped reduce the amount of time and resources spent on reporting. Tolworth’s situation, prior to OSRS, was a typical one – they had purchased a computerised intranet based solution which didn’t do the job it was supposed to. Despite spending large amounts on a computer system they still found themselves printing up tens of thousands of reports a year (3 times a year, multiple copies of each report) which takes a lot of time and even more financial resource. The benefits Tolworth experienced from implementing OSRS are:

1. The time spent by staff on creating reports was greatly reduced
2. No more thousand copy print runs
3. Easy analysis of student performance
4. Easy to see which reports remain unwritten / unseen by parents
5. Better communication with parents
6. Staff able to work from home on reports and submit final copy remotely
7. Overall cost saving due to less reliance on physical resources (ink, paper, wear on heavy duty printers etc)

Gill McMillan, a senior admin member at Tolworth, manages the system at the school, it is her job to make sure reports are written, that notices go out to staff and parents and that students are assigned to the correct classes. Having worked with the system for just over 2 years Gill says, “The report system has been extremly useful here, it makes it easier to keep track of which staff are up to date with reporting. I certainly don't miss printing up and sorting through thousands of copies of paper reports! I manage the system at the school and aside from students moving classes there isn't much to worry about, it pretty much runs itself. When there have been problems the support has been immediate and any problems have been resolved almost always within a couple of hours.”.

Tolworth were thoughtful in their implementation of the system, ensuring it was running smoothly for one year group before rolling it out, they also quickly learned lessons on how to inform parents of the changes to delivery of reports. From within the admin area Tolworth can mass email all parents (whose personal email address is on record) to inform them of the dates reports become available. Those parents who prefer not to recieve email notices are informed in the old way via school newsletters or personal letters. At the start of each school year staff inform parents of how the report system works and give new parents their login details at the first parents evening. Staff take the parents through the system on screen whilst talking through the first term performance and this allows them to ask any questions and get comfortable with it.

Those parents who don't have internet access at home or aren't comfortable using computers can specify to the school they wish to recieve paper copies - the school prints hard copies to be sent home for these parents. Upwards of 90% of parents opt to recieve the reports online.

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