K-12 Education


FileMaker Pro takes the stress out of student reports

Preparing reports can be a constant and stressful task for teachers at any school. A case in point is Scotch College Adelaide in South Australia , with 966 students from preschool to year 12. In the past, Middle/Senior College reports needed to be written and printed by the teachers, before being checked and approved by the Heads of House, and made accessible to school secretaries for posting. This, combined with strict educational and ethos reporting guidelines, led the College to seek an easy-to-use database software solution that would ease the burden.

The answer came from Scotch College 's IT Solutions Manager, David Jones, who used FileMaker Pro to create a simple and easy-to-use database system specifically designed for student reporting. "FileMaker Pro is an ideal product as it is cross platform, which is a pre-requisite in our school, and its ease of use makes designing systems a pleasure," said Mr Jones.

At the beginning of each semester, teachers now spend a few minutes building or editing their class lists on a master database on a FileMaker server, before downloading them into their own offline reporting databases on their laptop computers. Throughout the year, teachers create subject reports on their own laptops and automatically upload them, at their convenience, to the server-based master database. The system allows teachers to write reports in minimal time and in an easy-to-use manner.

Heads of House have the ability, via their own layout in the master database, to view, check and edit reports before writing their own summaries. The Heads of House can then notify secretaries that the reports are ready for printing.

"The system is proving to be popular with management and teachers as it is efficient and there is little paper shuffling. A danger with centralised data systems is that they may require intensive management by the database manager, particularly in this school which has complex and dynamic timetabling. However, this system has been designed to take advantage of the benefits of a centralised system, while giving individual teachers control and responsibility for their reporting," Mr Jones commented.

Benefits of the FileMaker Pro solution:

• Keeps the entire writing and collation process as simple as  possible.
• Minimises the time needed to produce, check and print reports.
• Enables teachers to maintain their own class lists, so as to keep the amount of centralised administration to a minimum.
• Produces reports that genuinely reflect the college's ethos and educational style.
• Enables teachers to produce subject reports on their own computers and to upload them at their convenience, to a server-based master database.
• Heads of House are able to easily view and check all of the teachers' subject reports and to write their own summary reports.
• Secretaries can easily collate the reports before printing.