Curacubby Team
|
October 26, 2022

Is A Student Management System The Best Choice For Your School?

Is A Student Management System The Best Choice For Your School?

Is a Student Management System the Best Choice for Your School?

With more student (and teacher) absenteeism than ever before, it feels like there’s a shift in attitudes at school. Teacher-student ratios are difficult to maintain at the best of times but as conditions change, the need for better management becomes pressing.

The more students teachers face, the more information they need to process; from enrollments to payment, to following along their academic journey with the right nudges and restrictions, coordinating all these data can save tremendous amounts of resources in schools.

Fortunately, many schools and educators are adopting management systems to help with this increasing workload, and to great effect. In this piece, we’re going to look into what exactly that means, and what you should look for, should you choose to employ such a system.

The Role of Student Management in Schools

Managing the classroom is the single most powerful struggle that teachers face, and the problem does not appear to be getting better. If anything, the teacher-to-student ratio is getting worse, making the management of students harder for teachers now than ever before.

It takes at least a few years for many teachers to reach a comfortable balance with students. The classroom is a dynamic and potentially chaotic environment with a lot to manage, even before the educational practices are factored in. Students need to be imbued with a sense of fairness, rationality, and confidence, as well as reaching their academic goals, and these factors can be extremely difficult to navigate consistently without good student management.

Managing students also brings with it elements of a transactional nature; gathering school payments, or dealing with permission for trips or extra-curricular activities. In essence, educators need to wear a lot of hats to be effective managers of students and their needs.

The management of these students requires a lot of information, and a lot of hard work, and while there is a need for educators to develop their best practices over time, there are systems that can be built to facilitate this.

Student management is, therefore, a learnable skill, but it’s one that can be heavily facilitated by the advancements of modern communications technology. These technological solutions take the skill of classroom management and consolidate much of the hard work into a much more manageable technical competency skill that allows a far greater efficiency than has been previously available to educators, by ways of a student management system.

What a Robust Student Management System can Accomplish

The success of various student and school management systems can’t be overstated. In Finland, students attend classes as little as half the amount of those in the US, have longer breaks, and consistently outperform their international peers in assessments. While there are many other factors contributing to this success, systems for managing students are well known for playing an effective role in this.

Student management systems can streamline a lot of the processes that clog up the schedule of educators, automating areas that don’t need personal management, and freeing up time to put the attention into areas that do.

So, student management allows teachers to tailor their approach to best match their environment. It requires being knowledgeable and insightful of the students they’re looking after and helps them facilitate those students on their best path. Of course, this is easier said than done, especially in an age where the average teacher has over 31 students at a time.

With the right access to information, teachers and parents can contribute to the management of students’ experiences and outcomes. Further, billing and payment can be handled electronically, removing room for error and miscalculations and providing schools with more detailed real-time, and accurately-partitioned financial data for decision-making.

A good electronic management system removes the need for cumbersome and costly paperwork records and is a more eco-friendly alternative too. So, what should you look for in a student management system? Let’s take a look.

Features of a Student Management System

The major responsibilities of a system for managing students are the collection, storage, and access of various points of information. Students need to be monitored in countless ways, using multiple metrics, and this requirement becomes an overwhelming task without the help oftechnology.

There are two approaches to developing a management system for students in your school. You can choose a comprehensive system that forms a total package of student management, or you can approach it on a case-to-case basis, tailoring the system using multiple packages that represent your specific needs.

Regardless of whether a school adopts a prepackaged or bespoke approach, a good student management system should include the following features:

Accessibility of information – this is for all stakeholders: teachers, students, and parents. With the ability of parents to track student progress online, teachers able to contact both students and parents on a single platform, and grade visibility for all to reference whenever they like, a good management system for students needs to provide this access.
Billings – Administration, and parents can schedule payments, will have access to school calendars, and will be able to pay electronically for the needs of the student, whether that’s school fees, lunch money, or field trips, or after-school activities.
Enrollment – This can be simplified tremendously with an electronic management system. Scheduling, logging, and communicating are all streamlined and results or feedback can be automated.
Task management – This ability to keep track of information can extend to daily tasks too. Scoring systems can illuminate areas for improvement, and highlight strengths to tailor lessons towards. Non-academic metrics such as social markers and levels of attention can be monitored too, allowing educators and parents to better appeal to the needs of the students.
School property management – an integrated system can keep track of library books, sports equipment, or anything else that’s borrowed by students, making the process of lending and returning a lot more controlled and effortless. Reminders can be automated according to these borrowing schedules.
 

This is a handful of the many features for a good student management system, and by building it up gradually, you can integrate multiple features into your system of management. Curacubby covers a lot of basis for you here; from enrollment, through billing and payment management, to managing school and recreational activities with a versatile platform that you can customize to your needs. Providing the institution with a more flexible and customizable approach to building up their management systems for students and can be factored into other schools’ management areas as well.

Conclusion

With the right components, any management system is going to save countless hours and money, as well as promote a better sense of organization and engagement. These benefits result in improved data accuracy, better parent, student, and teacher experiences, and an overall rise in productivity that corresponds to a decrease in spending.

Without a good system, schools are likely to become bogged down in the worsening conditions of high student absenteeism, and educators are likely to let more students fall through the cracks as they struggle to keep up with growing numbers.

With the use of specialized apps, it’s now much easier to stay on top of this increase in responsibility. Automate repetitive tasks, streamline communications and handle payments and other transactions smoothly, freeing up time to put your efforts where they are needed the most.