Coleg Menai, a further education college in Bangor North Wales
has rolled out Dynistics Active Dashboards business intelligence
software to help it benchmark against targets set by the Department
for Children, Education, Lifelong Learning and Skills (DCELLS) in
Wales; the results of which are published in a league table each
summer.
Active Dashboards allows Coleg Menai to provide concise,
accurate data and to measure its performance across college
departments, subject areas and individual courses against the
benchmarks set for all colleges in Wales.
"Active Dashboards provides management information to the
college's staff at the click of a mouse, and is graphically
depicted to show trends as well as providing a 'traffic light'
system against the benchmarks set across all 25 Welsh colleges by
DCELLS - we can immediately identify if we're above or below a
target and by how much," explains Meirion Roberts, performance
systems manager, Coleg Menai.
"With over 10,000 students in the college and around 580 staff,
we have an enormous amount of data to drill down into and cross
tabulate in order to provide the information for league tables.
"There's no doubt that its made the job of providing data to the
Welsh league tables a much faster and more efficient process as
well as providing college staff with ownership of their own data
related to their departments, courses and students."
Performance of Wales' 25 further education colleges is published
each year and selects three main areas for comparison;
• College completion; the number of students that start and
the number that finish - thus highlighting the number that dropped
out
• Attainment; from those who completed the course, how many
achieved the course qualification.
• Success rates; from those who started the course, how
many achieved the course qualification.
The dashboards allow the college to monitor student data faster
and more efficiently and have completely eliminated the need for
spread sheets or lengthy reports that were slow and cumbersome to
produce. Their use goes beyond just the league tables as they also
provide a powerful tool for ESTYN inspections (the Welsh equivalent
of OFSTED) and the college finance team.
"Like any college we have national benchmarks to achieve in
terms of student performance and success and the dashboards help us
monitor all manner of things including student attendance. We can
drill down to see which courses have attendance problems and even
monitor individual attendance," explains Meirion Roberts.
"We're able to link the software to our Celcat time tabling
system and dashboard the information held there; essentially, if we
can measure it, we can manage it."
Anthony Dent, managing director, Dynistics comments: "Active
Dashboards' unique ability to represent Welsh funding data is
setting the standard for College reporting in Wales. We are looking
forward to delivering the benefits to other Welsh colleges over the
next twelve months"
"Colleges are increasingly making a choice by opting to purchase
our best of breed solution because it enables them to immediately
obtain new insights from their existing systems and to improve
results"