Five remote schools in the Catholic Education Northern Territory (CENT) have migrated to a new Web-based software system from IT outsourcing services company Civica.
CENT has deployed the Civica Education Suite (CES) as part of its aim to provide best-in-class, online school administration tools to the region’s Catholic schools.
The five Catholic schools in remote communities are now using the centrally managed system, with teachers recording daily attendance and student welfare information within it.
Prior to CENT’s use of CES, the diocese had been using a Civica school administration system called Maze for 20 years to manage its daily administration processes.
{loadposition peter}The process involved cleaning up each of the school’s previous databases, and migrating data to a new single database and there was also additional software development to adapt to CENT needs, training sessions, and network management tasks completed.
Jeremy Howley, manager research and development, information technology for the Catholic Education Northern Territory, said: “Changing a business critical software application, such as your school administration system is a significant move for any educational establishment.
“We were fortunate that we had already made the move to a centrally hosted environment and my IT team had in-depth expertise in our school administration processes, enabling them to thoroughly test and review the software prior to rollout. This experience was relied upon when it came to releasing and deploying the software and I am very pleased to have achieved so much in such a short period of time.”
Howley said it was very important for CENT to have a system that was “user friendly and featured a single database that was able to simplify security, reporting, data warehouse integration and system administration for our school system”.
The remaining 12 CENT schools are scheduled to implement CES by the end of 2017.
Civica managing director for education, Simon Jones, said the CENT migration is the fourth jurisdiction or diocese-wide project the company has undertaken in Australia.
“The expertise of the CENT staff, combined with our established migration process, is a testament of our ability to migrate groups of schools efficiently and effectively. It is especially rewarding for us with the knowledge that we are able to play a small part in the ongoing success of schools located in some of the most remote areas in the whole of Australia, where delivering technology is an acknowledged challenge,” Jones said.