Wakefield Council’s Adult and Community Education Service is to reduce its administrative burden and improve the information available to managers by adopting UNIT-e, the student record tracking solution from Capita Further and Higher Education.
The team at Wakefield agreed that UNIT-e was the best solution to improve efficiency in the management of the training they provide for the service’s 10,000 enrolments, across more than 20 community centres, employers and schools.
Sue Johnson, service director for adult and community learning at Wakefield, said: “We realised that our existing systems needed to be updated to allow access directly from our many different learning centres. Using UNIT-e will mean that information on attendance and learners can be entered directly at community learning centres, rather than having to be collated and passed to the council team to enter. This will result in great efficiency savings.
“UNIT-e can also help us make effective use of the funding we receive based on the courses we offer and the learners who apply. This is particularly important as we provide such a wide range of courses, which tap into a number of different funding streams, including 16 to 18 education, Adult Learner Responsive courses, work-based training and family learning courses. Other information will also become more accessible – details of attendance, the take up of courses and feedback from employers hosting students in work-based learning schemes, for example. The information will help us to make better decisions about the content of courses and in refining what we offer so it meets the needs of our community.”
The service will implement online enrolment facilities and integrate this with Capita’s card payment services so that signing up for a course can be done from any computer, rather than requiring a visit to a learning centre.
George Layfield, head of sales at Capita Further and Higher Education, commented: “UNIT-e can help local authorities simplify the complex business of providing a diverse range of learning courses across multiple sites. It will help Wakefield cut administration by ensuring each learning centre can access and upload information on courses and learners directly into the system, which can then be reported on centrally. UNIT-e will also make sense of the numerous funding streams that the education team must juggle, giving them a clear picture of what resources are available to them.”
UNIT-e is central to supporting an effective management process in a variety of post-16 education and training institutions throughout England, Scotland and Wales. It covers the whole student lifecycle from online enquiries, applications and enrolments through to timetabling, attendance marking, examinations and professional placements.