Background

Bradford Girls Grammar School is a highly regarded independent day school with over 500 pupils aged between 2 and 18.  Founded in 1875 the school now has 500 pupils and prides itself on offering as wide a curriculum as possible.

Bradford Girls Grammar School has been using SchoolBase since 2007.

Experiences of SchoolBase
Angela Ashton Deputy Head (Curriculum)

“Since the transfer of data into Schoolbase from our previous systems in February 2008, we have gradually expanded our use of it for many aspects of school management including data input for all pupils in the school, importing the 2008/9 timetable, downloading external examination results, producing half-termly monitoring grade sheets & A5 parental reports post GCSE mocks plus, latterly, placing MidYIS, Alis and other test data in the testing area. This will now be developed to enable tracking of pupils to take place more rigidly.

We have 3 super users – admissions secretary, network manager & deputy head (curriculum) who is responsible for timetabling and use of data. The training and guidance given to these staff have been second to none. Other staff (examinations officer, assistant timetabler) have also attended training courses and have been impressed with the small group training and the manuals which are very clear and straight forward. Telephone calls for advice are dealt with efficiently and with extreme patience. “Beam the screen” is a Godsend – fairly spooky but brilliant!!

Many hours were spent by Furlong staff helping us to transfer the 2008/9 timetable from Nova into Schoolbase. The amount of “tweaking” that we had to do to make this possible seemed endless but they tried to assure us that our transfer had been very smooth. Their patience was second to none and I thank them for that. We have made use of the Time Builder facility to implement any timetabling changes and there has always been a friendly voice at the end of the telephone to help us with anything that was out of the ordinary.

We have had similar experiences when implementing our new monitoring grade sheets and reports. Any anomalies have been dealt with quickly and this has resulted in a smooth pilot during the current academic year. All staff are using the system and have commented on how easy it is to input their grades and comments. They are also finding the rest of Schoolbase relatively straightforward and many of them are very impressed with the features it contains.

We “flirted” with a different system and company but it was not at all user-friendly and the customer service support consisted of someone reading pages from the manuals which did not match what we were seeing on the screen. Our experience with Furlong could not be any more different. I have no hesitation in recommending the system to other schools.”