But in the meantime, principals still face the challenge of juggling important responsibilities, such as completing paperwork relating to compliancy, staffing and finance matters.
Cloud-based software company, intelliHR, has been making promising strides in helping schools minimise the workloads associated with these responsibilities.
intelliHR CEO, Rob Bromage, told The Educator that this is done by allowing schools to invest time in their people and regularly reflect upon, evaluate and measure performance at all levels against specific criteria.
TE: I understand that intelliHR is “the world’s only analytics-first, employee-centric people management software-as-a-service”. What does this essentially mean for a school principal who adopts this service?
RB: The application has always been about providing enterprise-level analytics for businesses, and when I look at human capital management analytics, a lot of businesses don’t understand what they are, or don’t have the training to understand how to interpret an attrition rate in a business and the dimensions you should pay attention to. The key thing to remember is that people are the heart of a business, and this is certainly true for schools. So what we’re essentially doing is helping schools to get a better pulse on how their teachers are performing by using guided HR metrics.
TE: What can you tell us about the staff qualification tracking options that IntelliHR provides schools?
RB: Many schools are completing their reviews and goals on paper or managing blue cards (a key prevention and monitoring system of people working with children) or teacher registrations in Excel. I look at this from a risk perspective for schools. We allow schools’ blue card management to be on an online forum with really cool compliancy dashboards. This allows staff see who should have the required qualifications in a given area, and manage things efficiently. For example, a volunteer can directly upload their information into the application without having to go anywhere or fill out paper forms. The person on the other side then sees it, writes up the blue card and gets the application approved.
TE: Drawing from your experience across the schooling and tech sectors, what are some of the biggest challenges you see for school principals in the year ahead?
RB: From our perspective, the world of business is continuing to change rapidly. A major consideration is, and will be, how principals focus on developing the future careers of their students. This also includes how they go about developing behavioural attitudes to constant change and the ability to adapt and be resilient. Schools should consider what the future world will look like and how the education system will equip them, not only with the knowledge but with the behavioural attributes to adapt to this world.
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