Background
Pangbourne College is a co-educational independent school in Berkshire; we have just under 400 pupils and are over 60% boarding. In 2000, frustrated with the poor performance of our then database system, we researched the market and found what we believed to be the best deal. It enabled us, after a time, to move to electronic reporting, to provide better timetabling and administrative functions, and to some extent to free up communication with parents.

But we became disillusioned. What had been a dynamic, helpful company became a branch of a much bigger firm and support became very poor, indeed practically non-responsive; we even had to pay handsomely to have our system developed to write reports. While staff could use the system, it took time to learn and was not intuitive; many functions which should be available to everyone were too complex and ended up being carried by a few experts; only one person ever learned to write the output routines. Further, the processor time needed to print reports became totally unacceptable.

Just knowing you have a poor product, however, is only a start. Just as in changing bank accounts, the inertia of existing systems and the time invested in configuration and training were big factors stopping us from looking elsewhere. But we were tempted to a presentation by Furlong and came away impressed. It took some persuading of other people that the change would be worth while, but we went for the change in February 2006.

In particular, the Bursary was committed to another package and encouraged us to consider adopting their academic module. Our decision not to go down that route has given the security advantage of separate systems, but we have been supported in this by Furlong's decision to provide methods to transfer data automatically between the two systems.

Achievements
What went wrong with the changeover? Well, very little. Furlong managed to convert the data from F******* to SchoolBase®; format for us, with a small amount of tidying-up at our end; we went away for half term with F******* and came back to SchoolBase®;. We allocated 30 minutes' training time per staff member in batches of 15; some staff didn't get to the sessions but found the system so intuitive they didn't need the training.

We went straight into the first report cycle - not without some fears. But to our delight things went well. Furlong designed our output for us (F****** would have had us writing our own); they were helpful in altering it to fit our needs; staff found it easy to write their reports. Extracting data on grades and so on is faster and easier than before. It's fair to say that there were a couple of bugs - but Furlong worked desperately hard to eliminate them; we're now in our second report cycle and things are seamless this time.

What has gone wrong since changeover? We have put in a good deal of effort in providing Furlong with ideas for further enhancements and have been pleased with the response - but this has increased the data managers' workload as staff constantly approach us and ask, "Can SchoolBase®; do this, too?" Perhaps this will settle down in time. One or two functions that we would like are not yet in place, but we are confident that they will appear. We forgot to train new staff at the beginning of term -and then found that they had trained themselves!

So what's gone well?

The migration from F******* to SchoolBase®; took most of a day during a half term. The arrival of the new system went down well and many people were already using it and exploring it before they were trained: it was genuinely that easy.

Reports flow easily from the system and older reports are readily accessed. It's been good to have a flexible system that can allow for the data manager's mistakes and can also clean up the final reports with no empty spaces. The input systems are easy to use.

The new cover system has taken many of our suggestions and is no harder to use than SchoolBase's ®; predecessor; as it becomes refined with experience it will become better.

Staff have found it easier to extract data from this system than the old one; they can print timetables, lists and labels for themselves; we have begun to use the tagging function to label groups of students; and one minor irritant has disappeared: the email headed, "Ignore this if you don't teach so-and-so."

Where we have had difficulty, we have had good support - often well beyond the working day. To have someone from Furlong spend a whole Saturday with us just to make sure things were working perfectly was a breath of fresh air.

As yet we haven't reached three or four critical tasks: entering large numbers of new students, building a new timetable for a new academic year, allocating students in bulk to teaching groups, and managing public exams. So we can't yet say how they will go.

Would we make the same decision again? Yes.

Quote from Pangbourne College Staff
"Our previous system: slow, non-intuitive, inflexible, hard to manage; SchoolBase®;: fast, intuitive, easy to manage: previous support slow and ineffective; current support fast and helpful" - Graham Simons, Pangbourne College

For more details please contact :
Graham Simons
Head of Lower School
Telephone : 0118 9842101
Website : www.pangbournecollege.com