Your software is a key contributor to your ability to run your school at maximum efficiency every day. When supporting HR, finance teams, teaching staff, leadership, and your admin teams, you need to be confident in your choice of school software.
A holistic approach is important in many areas of school life, and this can also be said for your approach to school technology. Chances are, you’re already using a management system to handle your daily school data.
Compliance is crucial to your ability to operate effectively and best safeguard students, parents, and staff. You need to meet legislative requirements and the expectations of your school community. However, managing compliance can be a very manual and time-consuming task – one that is often handed off to already busy HR teams.
Take the administrative burden off your team’s shoulders and support them with a software that manages all areas of school compliance, from documents and policies to staff training. But how do you make sure you’ve found a compliance software that can truly support school needs?
- Document management and audit trails
- E-learning and staff compliance
- Asset management
- Incident reporting and risk management
- Integration
- iSAMS supports school HR and compliance
Document management and audit trails
Handling documents can be one of the most time-consuming elements of effective compliance management. Ultimately, compliance requires a lot of paperwork, forms, and policies. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that these documents need to be stored and handled in paper form. In fact, many schools are looking to move completely paperless.
Your compliance software should support you in this goal. Not only to reduce paperwork, but also to maximise the security of key information.
With the right software, you will be able to distribute policies and documents quickly and easily, with a detailed trail following policy versions, approval process, document acceptance and changes. Your solutions should also work with your website to enable staff to access the most up to date information provided by your teams.
Not only does this ensure all policies are up to date, and staff are kept in the know quickly and efficiently, but it’s also much easier to follow the history of key documents and policies, gather important evidence and carry out audits. These can be vital for school and business inspections.
E-learning and staff compliance
Encouraging staff to stay up to date on policies and legislative requirements is a key component to overall school compliance. However, school staff are extremely busy, and it can be difficult to find time where all team members can work on qualifications and courses, and review important documentation.
E-learning and portals are key to a flexible approach to staff compliance. Your software should provide an easily accessible online platform that enables staff to carry out necessary courses and training, as well as review key documentation in a timely manner.
Flexibility and accessibility are the most important elements to keeping your staff up to date. Your HR teams also need to be able to keep track of staff progress in courses and which policies have been reviewed, and by who, in order to ensure a fully compliant workforce. An online platform helps to monitor this progress quickly and easily, with automated email reminders for staff.
Asset management
Let software assist you in the everyday challenges presented by asset management. Managing large and detailed data like this is where your school software should excel. Ultimately, it’s almost impossible to effectively track and manage assets, and related budget, manually.
The right compliance solution can help you to manage the movement of assets around your school and organisation, and use that information to help you budget more accurately for the future. This provides enhanced visibility regarding the status of assets, replacement programmes and their movements, while also supporting your finance team.
Not only that, but automating the management of assets helps to generate comprehensive audit trails to track the history of assets.
Incident reporting and risk management
It’s no surprise that running a school comes with risks and accidents happen. While you can’t necessarily prevent this, the key is to ensure that you’re sufficiently prepared to handle any issues or concerns.
Your software can support you in managing risk within your school and ensure that incidents are reported in a timely and organised manner, for maximum efficiency and better outcomes.
The best software should offer a range of features to support incident and risk management. For example, email alerts can help you stay in the know when incidents of set severities are logged. View trends in incidents that might indicate risk areas within the school, then work to reduce the likelihood of incidents re-occurring.
Task management is important to ensure that staff are kept updated on required action points and that progress is trackable. But more than that, your software should suit the needs of the education sector.
Consider searching for a software that can pre-populate common risks in schools and provide guidance on mitigating those risks, for more efficient risk management for HR teams and better safeguarding for students and staff.
Integration
A holistic approach to school management is important for efficiency in school teams and better outcomes for the entire school community. That’s why your software should support that approach, with seamless integration across your preferred systems.
Your compliance software should work in tandem with your HR software, ensuring that data is shared and accurate across systems. A modular approach enables you to build a solution that suits you, while maintaining consistency across software and databases.
By selecting school software that prioritises integration, you can trust that your once source of the truth is being accurately represented across your systems and your teams are able to work with the most accurate data.
iSAMS supports school HR and compliance
We have a range of software to support school HR departments, including self-service HR solutions, an online background checking tool, and dedicated compliance software. iSAMS’ modular and integrated approach enables schools to select a combination of systems that truly suit their needs.
Developed with schools in mind, our HR software provides your teams with the solutions they need to better manage their time, share tasks and admin, and maximise their efficiency.
If you’d like to learn more about any of our HR software for schools, you can request a demo here: