The mission of education
Australia’s educational system – childcare, primary and secondary schools – has a mission to educate our nation’s children, assessing, challenging, and helping pupils to achieve their full potential, whilst also keeping them secure and safeguarded.
The importance of records
One of the key steps to meeting this commitment is the keeping of detailed records – enrolment information, child assessment and progress reports, policies, incident records, medication data, and staff records. This means capturing accurate information at the start of the student’s educational journey, and updating, managing, securing and sharing that information as the student progresses through the system. Records management is regulated by the Australian Children’s Education and Childcare Quality Authority (ACECQA) and all educational facilities must meet (and prove that they meet) ACECQA’s standards.
But managing those records can be a costly and time-consuming experience – and one which takes staff time and energy that could be better spent caring for and educating children or improving the overall management of the school.
The answer – digital transformation.
‘Digital transformation’ means computerising records to change the way that they are managed – speeding up creation, ensuring the right levels of security, rapidly searching and finding the information that a school needs and ensuring that records are all kept in a way that complies with the Government’s stringent requirements – for up to 25 years in some cases.
A computerised system for records is known as a digital records management system, and Toshiba are experts in this field. We’re helping educational institutions around the world to implement digital records management in a way that drives efficiency and compliance and supports them to deliver the best levels of education and care.
Records management in education
If a school does not have a digital records management system, it is likely to take one of the following approaches, all of which have their limitations.
Paper records – records are still on paper or cards, and the archive is a box in the storeroom. Paper records are time consuming to create and manage, finding the right record can be a headache, security is often minimal and document retention in line with legislation can be hard to manage. Paper is costly, can only be viewed by one person at a time, and is carbon heavy. It carries a high risk of loss – from fire, flood, or simply being misplaced.
In house document management – documents are created and stored internally, on a PC hard drive for example. Whilst greener and less costly than paper, this approach still presents considerable risk in terms of security, backup and data retention.
3rd party document management – 3rd parties offer to take the problem off your hands, but not all have a platform that is secure and reliable. An educational institution must take responsibility for its own backups, and shouldn’t ever entrust this to an outside provider.
Toshiba’s educational records management solution
Toshiba’s educational records management solution is based on Microsoft 365 SharePoint. SharePoint is a stable, and reliable enterprise-grade, cloud-based records management platform. Many schools and childcare centres have already paid for Microsoft 365, so this solution requires no additional licencing costs.
Toshiba takes the world-class features of SharePoint and adds our own records management expertise, with services to set up a tailored system for your school or childcare centre, and the provision of ongoing support.
The Toshiba solution includes:
Rapid document onboarding – getting started with a digitised records management system usually involves converting existing paper records to digital formats. We provide a high function scanner to process multiple documents (up to 200 pages) at one time.
OCR – we don’t simply scan images of your documents, we ‘read’ them with optical character recognition (OCR) technology and convert them to text. You can search on the data within a document, and access the right records efficiently.
Easy filing – once the system is set up, filing new documents is straightforward, using Microsoft’s drag and drop function into the correct folders.
Rapid search and retrieval – SharePoint search function uses keywords (such as child name, date of birth) to quickly find the right document.
Enterprise grade archiving and backup - SharePoint is highly availability and includes a backup, which we tailor it to your exact requirements. You’ll own your data backups and have the peace of mind of knowing that whatever happens, you’ll be able to recover your data.
Compliance - we set up your retention policies in line with ACECQA regulations. For example, that incident reports must be kept for 25 years, whilst student enrolment, assessment, attendance and medication records can be deleted three years after the last date of attendance.
Comprehensive support – we provide training in how to use your new system (which is recorded and stored in SharePoint). We carry out monthly checks to make sure everything is running smoothly, and provide phone and self-help support.
Benefits of digital records management in education
The Toshiba solution is helping childcare providers around Australia to reduce costs, ensure compliance and deliver the highest quality care.
Reduced costs – digitised records eliminate paper, storage space, handling time, and the need for in-house IT systems.
Environmental responsibility - reducing paper and printing for increased sustainability
Regulatory compliance – enforced retention rules for full compliance
Security – enterprise security from Microsoft ensures privacy
Space saving - No more bulky paper files in the office or storeroom.
Document sharing – documents can be accessed by multiple staff members
Putting you in control – documents and backups are managed by you, not a 3rd party provider
Leveraging existing investment – if you are already using Microsoft 365, there is no additional license cost for using SharePoint.
Staff productivity – faster, more efficient records management processes frees staff up.
If you’re ready to start exploring your digital transformation journey, and give your school the benefits of digital records management, get in touch. We’ll assess what digital records management could do for you, set up and support your system - so that you can focus on what you do best: educating young Australians.
