An important solution for an important admissions team

Holyport College is a co-educational day and boarding school which caters for students aged 11-19 years. It was opened in September 2014 as a brand new state funded school with a sole educational sponsor – Eton College. Their vision is to deliver an all-rounded education to their pupils whilst striving for them to achieve academic excellence; fulfilling their potential and going on to leading universities and careers.

why wirebox?

Holyport College are currently using a School Information Management System (SIMS) called CapitaSIMS which is the most widely used Management Information System (MIS) in UK schools.

Admissions would have to fill an online form on their website, which would produce a data file to the administration team.

The data was manually added to CapitaSIMS which was increasing taking time away from the admission team and prone to human error.

The admission team also hold ‘registration bashes’ which can occur up to 4 times a year. Wirebox were told that it can take up to a solid week of work to organise these events because of all the manual labour required by the admissions team. It was time that they looked for a solution.

our approach_

Once Wirebox understood Holyport College’s initial issues were caused by manual data input, we knew that we had to automate the process in some way. We then set out to research CapitaSIMS to understand it’s capabilities and how we would integrate Holyport College’s website into it.

From our research, we found that CapitaSIMS allows external data to be imported via XML which was key to the solution which we provided. Wirebox developers created an online form that was implemented onto the website & could be emailed out to parents for them to fill out. On form submission, the data would be recorded in a database for the admissions team to export en mass in an XML format.

The biggest challenge we faced in this project was that we needed to ensure that the XML structure matched CapitaSIMS perfectly and implementing appropriate error handling so no data is misplaced.

the project included:

• Developmental research into CapitaSIMS and careful planning of XML structure
• Development of online forms that could be sent via email to parents
• Database development in order to capture data from the forms with export functionality
• Training the admissions team to utilise the newly developed database

outcomes_

Holyport College were very happy with the work Wirebox did and with their approach to finding a solution.

Holyport College had an automated admission into their CapitaSIMS system. The benefits were:

our approach delivered:

• Saved the admissions team 20 hours a week by removing the need for manual input and reduced errors made by ~15% due to the automation of data management.
• The admission teams Registration Bashes no longer take the whole team a week to organise and all the data collected is input directly into the database and transferred into CapitaSIMS
• Secure transfer of data from the Holyport College website to the database and then imported into CapitaSIMS – There is now no storage of data in Excel or CSV spreadsheets
• Generated a clear & defined audit train of data which is crucial for GDPR purposes, especially as the data is classed as sensitive.