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Cover Manager Quotes...

"I could never go back to the old way of allocating cover, this software has saved me so much time"

"The cost savings Cover Manager has made have been dramatic, we are using less supply staff as Cover Manager is so good at finding 'free' staff "

"Printing reports is easy, the head teacher would ask me 'how many staff have been absent?' or 'how much cover has been done?' With one click I can print out all the answers"

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Cover Manager Case Study 1

Objective: To reduce the workload required to undertake the daily task of managing internal and external cover for absent teaching staff.

Contract: Croxteth Community Comprehensive School
Start Date: September 2006
Term: Software has been tested and modified over a period of 2 years
Principle Contact: Mr J. Whittle

Introduction

3 Square Associates specialise in educational software and are focused on bringing technology to the forefront of managing internal supply cover for schools.

Cover Manager, an innovative staffing system, allows schools to revolutionise the way cover is allocated. In short, Cover Manager will reduce workload, save time and save money.

Cover Manager brings many improvements compared to traditional methods:

* Reduces the amount of time it takes to manage the daily cover lis

* Improves the efficiency of selecting internal staff to use for cover

* Allows for better selection of staff (matching specialists to subjects)

* Improves ‘fairness’ in the selection of internal staff for supply cover

* Allows ‘cover’ feedback of statistics to head teachers and other parties

* Reduces the need to use external supply agencies therefore saving money

* Allows a seamless solution for procurement of supply staff

* Provides an all-in-one solution for managing cover in schools

* Promotes positive working relationships with staff

Pilot Scheme

Mr. Jeff Whittle, a senior teacher at Croxteth Community Comprehensive School, Liverpool, has been managing supply cover for over five years using the traditional methods of pen, paper and lengthy timetable searches. Jeff agreed to pilot Cover Manager at Croxteth.

Jeff Whittle: “Before Cover Manager”

“In the old days, organising staff cover was a time consuming process, this is how I used to organise things:

1. Staff would call in the morning or, if I was lucky, the night before to say they were going to be absent and I’d draw up an absence list.

2. I’d then search through an A2 sheet of staff timetables and write out the absent teachers lessons for that day.

3. I’d have to go through the A2 timetable again and find all teachers who had ‘free’ periods during that day and write these down.

4. Finally, I would select from the free teachers and write up a cover timetable for the absent member of staff.

To the layperson this may seem an easy but time-consuming task, however, there is more to it than just picking a teacher to cover a lesson.

I had to think about what staff I’d used the day before or even a few days before, I had to think about how many lessons the cover staff would have in a day, including the cover lesson, how many lessons staff had covered in total or during that week. I used to write all this down in a diary to try and keep on top of it. It was not an easy task remembering and recording all this information. Needless to say, I constantly got it wrong and was reminded about it when staff would come to me and complain because I’d used them several times a week. Managing daily cover was a daunting and stressful task.

This difficult task was made even worse if staff called in absent at 7:45, I’d only have around half an hour to search timetables, find staff, amend the cover list, photocopy it and distribute to staff.“

Jeff Whittle: “How Cover Manager has helped me.”

“I was very efficient using the old system we had in place, or at least I thought I was, until I started to use Cover Manager. I’ve gained hours of my time back, especially on Sundays, and could never revert back to the old system.

A member of staff will still call in the morning or the night before to say they were going to be absent.

1. I simply click a list which displays all the teachers names, I select the absent teacher and the day of absence and like magic the absent teachers timetable appears FOR THAT DAY right in front of me. Already this feature has saved me lots of time as I don’t have to go through the A2 master timetable, search for the lessons and write them down. I can do this for any teacher on any day and the correct timetable will pop up in an instant.

2. I then have the Auto Cover feature which in my opinion is the best feature of all, I click the Auto Cover feature and the cover list is automatically completed for me even using the most appropriate staff or the staff who have done the least cover. That is it, cover list done! It is simply a matter of printing and distributing to staff.

There are many other features of Cover Manager that makes my life easier, I can report stats and finances back to the head teacher or even instantly tell staff how many cover lessons they have done. There are far fewer complaints from the staff as they know they will get the same percentage of cover compared to their colleagues, the computer works all this out for me so there is no human error, this has made the job less stressful.

Cover Manager is a fantastic piece of kit that I would recommend to all schools. I could work without other software but not without Cover Manager.”

Jeff Whittle, Supply Cover Manager, Croxteth Comprehensive, Liverpool