Burnley College is a further education college based in Burnley, UK, their provision includes sixth form, adult learning, apprenticeships and university education.
Burnley College has been using Tribal’s leading Student Information System – ebs - since the start of the 2003/04 academic year, their team has over 18 years’ experience using the solution.
Today, they use a large suite of ebs modules, including:
- Admissions
- Enrolments
- Registers and Timetables
- ILR (Individualised Learner Record)
- Exams and Exams Seating Planner
- Ontrack Hub
- Prospect (Admissions)
- Digital Signatures
- Block Matrix
- MIAP
- PLR Attainments
The college has found that ebs and Tribal technology has enabled them to streamline their student data and funding streams, and 15 years from implementation it is crucial to their student journey and success.
From then to now
Tribal solutions have changed over the years and have been at the forefront of sector changes and student expectations. ebs offers colleges and alternative education providers real-time digital technologies for reporting and communication and empowers their staff and students to achieve more successful outcomes.
Since their 2003/04 ebs implementation, Burnley College has changed from Oracle to a SQL server, which has allowed a more efficient and effective integration with their other key systems. Their college are now making good use of the web services functionality in ebs which has allowed them to create learner details on a registration form at open events. Web services stores the data in ebs and allows them to query ebs data to see a student’s study and event attendance with the college.
Phillip Glass, Software Development Manager at Burnley College said:
“ebs is built specifically for further education use which helps us to provide an efficient and effective service to our staff and students. It allows rules to be applied which match funding requirements of the relevant bodies. The use of custom tables allows Burnley College to customise the solution for its business needs.”
Improving and streamlining processes
Their use of Tribal solutions not only ensures that the college meets their statutory returns, but also helps them to provide a full suite of data and reports that help make the day to day running of their college more efficient.
The Digital Signatures solution has helped Burnley College to streamline their enrolment process, when enrolling new learners, the college uses iPads for the learners to sign their learner agreement and this is stored in the ebs communication hub. The main benefit they have experienced is the reduction of paper that would previously have been used during enrolment, and they are saving time that would have previously been spent filing documents. Learners expect colleges to use technology to allow easy enrolment. This process increases efficiency and reduces manual processes for the college admin team: the learner is enrolled on the system immediately so the college has accurate and live enrolment figures and all the data is immediately available for all staff, so they can begin to allocate registers.
Burnley College has also implemented Prospect Admissions which complements their current admissions process by allowing learners to apply online and book an interview date and time that suits them. The introduction of this module has allowed the college to re-evaluate their admissions process to ensure learners get a positive experience and are communicated with effectively.
Looking to the future
Phillip continued:
“We look at how we use Tribal products and new technology to ensure that we are constantly striving to achieve the best. We ensure we are as efficient and effective as possible and that we provide the best possible service and systems to our staff, learners and prospective customers.”
Working with the Tribal Team
To conclude, Phillip Glass, Software Development Manager at Burnley College said:
“We have a very good working relationship with the Tribal team, we regularly suggest improvements to the system that would not only benefit ourselves as an organisation but all users of ebs. We have recently been part of a small working group that focused on the ILR and looked at how the process can be improved. As a result of this in the 4.27 ebs releases we had four developments that were implemented that are a great benefit to all colleges.”
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