Records Management in the Education Sector
Improve school operations with digitization and document management.
The education sector has always been used to handling loads of paperwork. These educational organizations manage employee files, financial documents, student records, education compliance documents, and various forms, which are primarily stored on paper, making the processes to manage them inefficient. Keeping these confidential documents secure and accessible is a primary concern for these educational institutions. Even electronic documents, if not stored properly, come with security risks.
Importance of Records Management in the Education Sector
The importance of proper management of documents in the education sector is outlined in a study titled, “Excellent School Records Behaviour for Effective Management of Educational Systems” by Rose Ngozi Amanchukwu.
Accountability: Record keeping is vital to an education system’s information cycle as a whole, because of its fundamental role in the process of efficient information production and collection. School records are an important means of accountability because they provide proof. Records such as cash books and stock books help to ensure accountability as they show income, expenditures, and stock levels in a school. These cash and stock books can then be made available to auditors on demand for the auditing of school funds and facilities.
Decision Making: School records help school administrators to make decisions. Records provide raw data that enable coherent, balanced, and objective decisions on issues such as promotion, student and staff discipline, and teaching and learning performances.
Employment: Properly kept human resource records serve useful employment and planning-related purposes.
The number of staff, their areas of specialization, qualifications, age, gender, and so on will help the principal to determine the human resource needs and assets of his or her school. Consistent information kept about employees can also be used in employee performance appraisals.
Guidance Counselors: School records are of great importance to school guidance counselors as these records can provide counselors with a holistic picture of the students they counsel (academic grades and achievements, disciplinary measures taken, and/or extracurricular activities) and can help counselors track student progress.
Information Bank: Records kept in schools serve as an information bank from which school administrators can recall information as needed.
Information for Parents: Parents often want to know how their children or wards perform academically. Records of school report cards and/or end-of-term results should be kept by schools should parents wish to review or discuss past student performance.
Planning: Accurate data assists educational planners to identify areas of need that should be addressed or accorded priority attention.
Student Academic Achievement and Behavior: Certificates and testimonials are issued to graduating students to show how they performed during their studies. Properly kept records can help considerably in the accurate production of thorough certificates/testimonials.
Subject Time Table: School timetables help in the coordination of staff and student activities and work. Keeping track of timetables from year to year can help a school and school administrators determine which combination of classes and teaching assignments works best to optimize teaching and learning.
Supervisors/Inspectors: The availability of records enables supervisors or inspectors to objectively assess student and staff performance and offer advice or proposals for improvement.
Document management as a solution to records management challenges
Archive One helps record managers overcome the main challenges in controlling and managing documents in the education sector.
- Centralized and secure access to student documents
- Control over rights, permissions, and levels of access for users and departments
- Permission-based access to information
- Compliance with retention schedules of documents
- Easier preparation for audits with monitored system events and drag-and-drop reporting tool
Records Management with Archive One
Archive One gives education providers a powerful tool to organize and facilitate the sharing of information to allow administrative and teaching staff to have secure and ready access to documents. Moreover, it alleviates all document management challenges and helps educational institutions eliminate time spent in retrieving and managing documents as the documents are centrally controlled and securely stored in a cloud environment.
Save costs, increase efficiency, be disaster-proof, and keep your documents secure with Archive One!
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Archive One is a document management system (DMS) designed to help companies easily classify, store, secure, and retrieve essential company documents that are needed for retention and audits. With our partners' help, we provide an end-to-end document management solution from scanning to document storage at a highly competitive price.