Case Study: Tenison Woods College (Event 1)
 
The best way to assess the benefits of the system is to compare results from real events. Tenison Woods College is a large and progressive K-12 school located in Mount Gambier, a regional area in South Australia. After many years of running the traditional student led scheduling, they became concerned about the educational impact of student involvement in the organiser role of the process, and also wanted to make the event schedule more efficient. As a result they decided to change to a School-Led approach where parents phone into the school for their interview times.

While this was found to be a better approach, the school found it was spending over 40 hours of office staff time to organise the event, and the schedules were still not constructed as efficiently as they would like. They decided to trial the EdvalPTN Parent Teacher Scheduling system. The school was able to provide a complete set of manually prepared interview schedules for their most recent event for analysis. EdvalPTN demonstrated very significant savings in time, cost and educational quality by quickly delivering a far better schedule, based solely on the historical interview data provided.
 
The results of this analysis show that significant savings can be easily obtained, including savings of 15 hours of teacher time waste, teachers can go home earlier by over 20 hours, parent time waste can be reduced by over 15 hours, and event congestion can be reduced by 70-90% depending on parameters used. This is nothing short of an incredible result. It is also interesting in that this event was a school scheduled event, which is already far more efficient than the more traditional manualy scheduledstudent-led event.
 
The school also estimated that over 40 hours was spent by office staff in the event administration, which would be significantly reduced under an EdvalPTN model.
 
As there was no historical data available relating to parents who missed out on being granted their interviews, this could not be analysed - though other case studies clearly show batch processing can grant significantly more interview requests within the specified event time compared to manual methods.
 
EdvalPTN prepared a range of schedule solutions with slightly different criteria – so that each could be directly compared to the sample source data. This also highlights the benefit of dynamic event parameters which allow production of solutions to more appropriately match school needs.
 
  • EdvalPTN Default. A batch solution using the default system parameters. This generally provides the best overall solution as it addresses both parents and teachers roughly equally.
  • EdvalPTN Late Meal. There is significant and noticeable improvement in this solution, due solely to a slight 30 minute adjustment on the time to start the meal break.
  • EdvalPTN Parent Focused. This solution takes the historical interview requests and constructs a solution which is far more parent focused compared to teachers. This is at a slight disadvantage to the quality of teacher schedules.
  • EdvalPTN Teacher Focused. This solution takes the historical interview requests and constructs a solution which is far more teacher focused compared to teachers. This is at a slight disadvantage to the quality of parent schedules.

 

Click to see the results of this study.

 

This research data was obtained by consent and in conjunction with Tenison Woods College, Mount Gambier, SA. Results may be verified by contacting the school directly: Telephone: +61 8 8725 5455 Facsimile: +61 8 8724 9303

  • Cathy Elliot-Jones (Senior School Learning and Wellbeing Facilitator)
  • Pam Ronan (Principal)