Northern Territory Department of Education complete the rollout and implementation of their next generation, enterprise school management system.

• Legacy school administration system replaced on budget, and without disruption to schools
• 34,000 primary and secondary students managed through a central data system
• Student data is easily tracked from school to school helping mobile communities of remote NT

Facing challenges that few other education management bodies encounter, the department is responsible for more than 34,000 students in over 152 schools spread across a geography of 1.421 million km². Many of these schools provide vital education for rural and Indigenous communities.

Schools in the Northern Territory had previously used a decentralised client/server based student management system. Although this system met the needs of the schools for over 10 years, the department’s vision to engage new technologies and provide the Territory’s schools with a modern-day solution was the driving force in partnering with Civica in 2012.

Key benefits for the Northern Territory Department of Education

The benefits of the centrally hosted system include:

• Entirely web-delivered with extensive cost savings in ICT hardware and associated software management;
• Intuitive and powerful reporting and analysis tools to help inform school improvement strategies. Reporting can occur at a school level or across the whole jurisdiction;
• Secure online access available anytime anywhere and on various devices, meaning end users can access the system from any location;
• Quick & easy to use interface, which can significantly reduce staff workload and the need for training;
• Software upgrades are applied once centrally, saving time and money, and ensuring that all schools can use new releases straight away;
• Parameters can be managed by central office ensuring data consistency across the whole jurisdiction;
• Efficiently integrates other third party systems via web services;
• An efficient way to input and capture all student data in one central system.

The Department of Education are now benefiting from a centralised single source of data that can be accessed by school administrators, teachers and department staff on a variety of devices at any time. In addition, the interface helps teachers and office staff adapt to the new system with little or no training.

The partnership with Civica, coupled with the committed and capable members of my team, enabled a very cost effective migration and implementation which also provided learning and development opportunities for department staff. The end result has been the smooth delivery of a very complex project with little or no disruption to schools and students."

Satpinder Daroch, Chief Information Officer, Northern Territory Department of Education.

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