policy & reform
burden of meeting multiple requirements and requests can be an extraordinary administrative overhead.
The problems multiply when compliance requirements are poorly articulated by legislation, which can lead to confusion and misinterpretation among education providers and auditors.
Compliance allows organisations to locate and manage issues with its operations, while at the same time adopting accepted corporate, operational and regulatory governance standards. Ensuring that a streamlined process is adhered to in teaching and learning leads to more accurate reporting of student records.
Compliance which has little or no integration with a college’ s operations has no opportunity to drive positive change.
But at their core, compliance frameworks provide the tools to help educational institutions create a quality approach to education and training.
Smart education providers are leveraging compliance frameworks to continuously improve management processes and systems, and data gathered for compliance can also be used for more effective decision-making.
In short, the best practice is to align the standards in a compliance framework with an organisation’ s daily teaching, learning and business procedures.
Approached in the right way, compliance should provide the framework to run an organisation more efficiently and effectively.
Whether the framework is maintained on a spreadsheet or within a specialist student management system, the credibility of an organisation’ s compliance data will be in question if it cannot be verified.
The up-front planning for this framework is very important in order to be efficient and effective with compliance and find the balance between the benefits associated with greater control versus inevitable administrative costs.
This framework also provides an opportunity for educational institutions to take advantage of data gathered that goes beyond the information required for verification by regulatory bodies.
By identifying such opportunities, a standard compliance framework can in fact be turned into a powerful enterprise management tool.
Compliance managers can gain valuable insights by analysing such data and drive the creation of reporting structures that not only ensure compliance but also further the institution’ s operational capacity.
However, dealing with large amounts of data can be a daunting task when tackled manually.
Aside from being costly, this manual method is also very timeconsuming, as the compliance manager has to work through disparate systems or spread sheets for recording data. It might also involve consolidating and reconciling said systems to eliminate potential duplication.
Aside from the consumption of time, when manual spread sheet processes are used for compliance, it is typical for an organisation to discover that it has as much as a 15 per cent error rate – often such items may never be discovered in a compliance audit, but errors do exist.
A specialist school management solution makes reviewing and consolidating data simple. Such solutions make it easy to configure bespoke or required reports for many of the elements that need to be complied with.
By implementing formal policies and procedures, along with a well thought through compliance framework and a professionally supported student management solution, institutions can more easily control, manage and support the compliance“ ghosts” which haunt many education providers and bring a more rational, scientific approach to compliance. n
Marcel Creed is the senior executive of Sky Software. www. campusreview. com. au April 2013 | 25