Department for Education & Skills

As part of the DfES National Teaching and Learning Change Programme, the SLC programme delivered training content to over 21,000 individuals at 4000 organisations nationally. The programme collected a great deal of personal data and associated information, relating to event registration, resource distribution and professional accreditation.

At the outset of the project, data for the SLC programme was highly fragmented and poorly maintained. The core data was stored using a proprietary desktop application - other stakeholders maintained independent copies of this data along with additional information stored largely in separate spreadsheets. Reporting was difficult and often the results rendered void due to the poor quality of the input data.

In the first instance, we spent several months working with the client, gaining an understanding of underlying data model for the programme. We then selected a leading open-source CRM package and heavily modified it to meet the requirements of representing such a complex data model - adding over 20 custom modules each with powerful search facilities. Beyond this, we worked to allow for stakeholders to better consume the data available. We developed an extensible reporting framework that allows for complex, time sensitive reports to be generated, saved and then exported in a number of consumable formats. We also developed a tool to allow mass-communication (through data export for mail-merges, or direct email from within the application) to both individuals and organisations.

The benefits of having a centralised data source that all relevant parties could access was immediately obvious. By using reporting tools we had developed, stakeholders could easily see duplicated and anomalous data - and then use the system to correct this. The system contained over 3 quarters of a million rows of data, and was used to communicate key programme information to hundreds of individuals on a daily basis.