5 Reasons Schools Turn To Dive Analytics For Relief Planning

Teacher using laptop

For most schools, relief planning is both challenging and stressful. Often, teachers in the relief planning team have to report to school earlier to ensure that every lesson requiring relief has been duly scheduled and accounted for before the first lesson commences.

This process is often not only tedious but also stressful as staff have to quickly sieve through each teacher’s timetable to identify the suitable relief teachers before the first lesson. At times, they may also be called to “firefight” in the event of unforeseen circumstances – from last minute absences to teachers who may have forgotten to report their non-attendance. Beyond this, the relief planning team must also be ready to manage complaints from teachers who may feel burdened by too many relief duties.

Fret not, for there is now a much better way to ensure a hassle-free relief scheduling process for your school! By leveraging digital technologies, we have modernised relief planning fit for the educators of the future. As K-12 schools continue to target pain points by integrating digital technologies, many are sourcing for solutions to shed the burden shouldered by their respective relief planning teams. That’s where Dive Analytics’ Relief Planning System enters the fray.

Let’s explore 5 ways Dive Analytics’ Relief Planning System is helping streamline schools’ relief scheduling process; ensure fair allocation of relief assignments and mitigate the stress on your relief planning team today!

1. Saves Time, Cuts Costs and Reduces Stress

One major highlight for the relief planning committee is a significantly shorter relief allocation process from start to finish. That’s right, Dive ensures that you can enjoy significant cost-cutting from logistics to your man-hours as well as alleviate stress on teams as they schedule relief assignments. At this point, you might be wondering how it’s possible.

As proponents of the digital era, we achieve this by leveraging automation to streamline your entire registration process into a one-stop system bespoke to your school’s needs. Leave it to the system to subsequently allocate automatically every morning based on your school’s predefined rules and criteria.

Empower Educators With Automation. Cut Costs, Not Corners.

Through automated scheduling, you can now enjoy a speedy and impartial allocation of relief duties. Importantly, teachers only need to be involved for a few minutes. What more does this imply for the relief committee exactly? Just ask Orchid Secondary School. Since automating their relief scheduling, their relief planning team has been reporting to school at a later time and saves at least 30 minutes each day.

Similarly, now that department heads no longer have to screen individual timetables, both easily save between 30 minutes to an hour of administrative time each day – that’s potentially hundreds of combined hours per year! A stark contrast to the old status quo, their staff are now also less stressed since they no longer have to assign duties at the crack of dawn.

Manpower efficiency was not the only area that showed remarkable improvement. With the need for hard copies for timetable-related affairs now gone, the school in fact now saves thousands of hard copy sheets alone over the course of an academic year!

It doesn’t stop there. The system also shortens the planning of exam invigilation duties. Forget about long, drawn-out procedures – with the system’s exam invigilation module, you can effectively schedule your entire exam invigilation details in just a few clicks.

Overall, this ensures greater efficiency and simplifies manual processes to make it time efficient. Other than helping you minimise extraneous costs, frees up pockets of time for your teachers and affords them the peace of mind they deserve.

2. Intelligent Matching and Allocation: Convenient and Less Error-Prone

Imagine a fair and transparent system in assigning relief within and across departments that is capable of bringing the best outcomes for all. We understand that the planning process is often complex – the ideal relief staff would be one who can adequately administer the lesson instead of simply “baby sitting” the class which comprises precious curriculum time.

At the same time, they cannot too frequently be key position holders such as the Heads of Department (HODs) who often have fewer teaching lessons. After all, it might hinder them from discharging their main duties. It thus comes as no surprise that the allocation process can be demanding and at times even error-prone. That is only the tip of the iceberg – what about the teachers at risk of being overworked?

Thankfully, not all is lost. Let’s examine our partner Woodgrove Secondary School’s case of how it successfully digitised its inundating manual processes to tackle the same issues we just highlighted.

Easy viewing and planning of relief duties by the different IP Heads

~ Teo S, Woodgroove Secondary School

By adopting the smart system, they eliminated the need for staff to manually weigh their options. It automates this selection process impartially by taking into account each teachers’ compatibility, availability and workload through our proven and tested algorithm. This prevented human errors and ensured no one teacher or department was especially overworked.

Beyond that, the accessible one-stop system and dashboard simplified the viewing of absences and different timetables which saved the relief committee plenty of time. IP heads were also delighted as they could generate useful reports with ease to stay atop the situation.

Worried because your school operates differently? Fret not, our system is also fully customisable to meet your school’s workflow preferences. Whether your school operates on a dual-week timetable or has special adjunct teacher arrangements, our intelligent matching algorithm can be configured to best fit your school’s requirements.

Enjoy unprecedented productivity with our relief system. Plan your teaching schedules in advance and more conveniently with a glance of your smartphones or tablets wherever, whenever.

3. Clarity Amongst All

Another cause for concern for schools resorting to the traditional manual approach are communication mishaps. This is especially a problem when teachers may have forgotten to report their absences in advance. Other times, busy teachers may miss out on important notifications as well. It thus becomes imperative to have a robust notifications system in place to prevent key information from being overlooked.

Teachers can report their absences in advance with ease via their smartphone or other preferred devices. This streamlining encourages teachers to report their absences punctually and allows relief duties to be assigned earlier.

In conjunction with this, our system also implements push notifications to inform teachers of relief duties. Whereas schools have had to manually notify them hitherto, our system will send them daily push notifications instead. Teachers can then easily acknowledge their new duty via a simple click of a button, ensuring clarity amongst all.

And that is not all, your school EXCO will also receive daily reports that keeps them updated on the daily absences and assignments. This eliminates the need for having to manually notify teachers while simultaneously keeping everyone in the loop and aware of their tasks.

4. Seamless Data Integration

Concerned about our system’s compatibility with your timetabling software?

Worry not. Regardless of your school’s timetabling software of choice – aSc or STA, our system can seamlessly integrate and process your timetabling data within just a few clicks. This affords the relief committee great convenience and a peace of mind as your data will be integrated accurately without hiccups.

Conclusion

The era of reporting to school early to manually manage duties is over – Dive Analytics leverages digital technologies to give teachers the peace of mind they deserve.

In this digital age, traditionally manual tasks should be automated and streamlined as much as possible. As teachers and schools look for new avenues to be productive, Dive Analytics works hard to integrate modern technologies to deliver effective solutions for educators. After all, they deserve everything to be able to carry out their mission of nurturing our next generation.

Book a demo now to see how Dive Analytics can partner your school and bridge the gap towards the era of digitalisation.