Data management

[Stuart_C]

Just wondering, who's in charge of your pupil contact data?

For example we have here one member of staff who's job it is to update all the information in SIMS, changes of address etc. In theory the information normally comes into the Bursay, or the head's office or housemaster/mistress, is passed on and she updates SIMS.

I then occasionaly check things to look for anything strange or just force her to double check sections.

Now we could skip a step as all the people I mentioned, becuase of the nature of their role's change the data. Which could be an idea or a recipie for disaster.

So I just wondered what sort of things do you do? Whats your policy for data management?
I'll settle for "in theory" if you don't whan to confess what actually happens

[CAM]

Uhh, admissions I think was done by our school secretary but that has been changed around recently. Pupil data is maintained by three admin ladies with the title Key Stage Manager, one per key stage.

[john]

We have a dedicated Data Manager she does all that work, however I will update things for her if she's really busy or if a tutor / head of house tells me of a change of details as us admin and support staff are there for each other and as I am a person named responsible for the MIS in my Job Description its always good to keep my hand in as when we don't have a data manager it falls upon me and the Assistant Head responsible for Assessment and Reporting to do the Data Managers job.

[vikpaw]

For us it was the secretaries in each school (lower school, middle school, upper school) who maintained it, but with families linked together it was a nightmare.

Since i got here, i've changed it so the central control is held with the Admissions / Registrations department. They put pre-admission students on in any of our schools, and make all the links to families etc. Control mailing points and such like. If something needs changing, then the school asks them to do it, and that way we maintain integrity, and hopefully, over the next few years will slowly but surely get rid of all our duplicate data, mostly of contacts.

This is now working really well. In the first term we do a data update form for all families, listing all their kids on it, and then the admissions girls put that onto SIMS. It's a pain for the schools that were used to editing data but it's making our data cleaner having one office in charge of it all. I guess for schools with only the one main office, that would be okay for them to manage from there, for us the registrations team is separate from the schools and is based in admin.