Circle Insights

How Birmingham City Council makes school admissions easy

Authors
Marcus Le Brocq
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Birmingham City Council has more than 400 schools in its area and made the decision in August 2019 to deploy IMPULSE Nexus from CACI to support its school admissions process. To date, Birmingham City Council has used IMPULSE Nexus to administer school admissions across all its schools, helping it to maintain a fair and transparent process that handles this delicate process with care, accuracy and flexibility.

School admissions

IMPULSE Nexus has also supported the schools across Birmingham City Council with in-year admissions, allocating spaces to children who need to move between schools during the school year. “The system is a major step forward,” said one school portal user during a recent Birmingham City Council IMPULSE Nexus user group meeting. “We need the data to be correct at both ends due to the transiency of some pupils and IMPULSE Nexus has ensured that we always have instant access to accurate data.”

“We can get distances to schools instantly”

An important factor in determining school allocations is a child’s domestic location and how far they are from the school being applied to. IMPULSE Nexus automates this part of the process for the school admissions process, making it easier for administrators to make swift decisions based upon this metric. “It’s a lot quicker to get people on the waiting list and we can get distances to schools instantly, which is really useful for our admissions processes,” commented another school admissions administrator.

“Having the distances so quickly and easily is great – we know immediately who the closest person to a school is,” added another.

The school portal within IMPULSE Nexus acts as a central record from which all information on a child and school can be viewed. This means that administrators can easily access relevant information, such as distances and the local school rankings. “The school portal is a major step forward for us, it’s great to be able to see data in real time in there,” says one user of IMPULSE Nexus within Birmingham City Council’s network of schools. “It makes it really straightforward to manage the process and it’s easy to see where your students are.”

Communication made simple

IMPULSE Nexus has also made communication easier between the schools, admissions teams and Birmingham City Council professionals. Not only can communication be automated via the use of templates within the system, the need for email communications has been reduced as administrators and admissions teams can find the information they need themselves within IMPULSE Nexus. “Having distances available automatically is great, as is the ability to download rankings spreadsheets instantly,” says another. “I like the speed of everything, I’m contacting the admissions teams more infrequently which cuts out unnecessary emails and calls. The school, overall, is emailing the local authority a lot less now, as the data is available in real time and the speed of access is really good.”

Another benefit unlocked within Birmingham City Council has been the ability to rank schools in the area, with IMPULSE Nexus linking directly to the schools ranking system. “It’s a really useful piece of functionality,” said one administrator. “IMPULSE Nexus links directly to the ranking system, which makes allocating places easier. We can import and export relevant data automatically, too, which saves a lot of time in requesting and sending information.”

Overall, IMPULE Nexus is helping the schools, administrators and professionals across Birmingham City Council to more efficiently, accurately and easily manage the schools admission process for the children in the area.

Automation

Moving away from a manual process makes the whole school admissions process far smoother. Without the need to rely on data input and sifting through spreadsheets for information, decisions can be made much quicker, more accurately and more independently. Resolution of appeals is made simple with a reliable data trail of decisions and why they were reached. In year admissions can be handled swiftly by easily identifying which schools have places available and adding children to waiting lists can be done instantly.

By further linking your admissions process to aspects such as school rankings, distances travelled and each child’s personal journey, swifter, fairer and more transparent decisions can be reached. “The reduction in the manual process has been great,” concluded one administrator. “Having so much in-depth information available to us, with the ability to share data instantly, makes the whole process so much easier.”

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Authors
Marcus Le Brocq
Email