DUBAI ENGLISH SCHOOL
In today’s world, the policy of bigger is better certainly does apply to all companies and institutions. However any company or institution would always have a large amount of data, which has to be stored and categorized properly. Failure to categorise data would eventually lead to a lot of confusion and problems and this would then lead to the inefficient running of the company.
This is precisely the problem facing Dubai English School. Dubai English School is now a highly reputed school and was first started in 1978. Since then the number of students and teachers have grown from a few handful to thousands. With the coming of every academic year, hundreds of students apply for a chance to be admitted. As a large school, Dubai English School has a responsibility of handling vast amounts of data. This would include records of all its thousands of students to the date of birth of a teacher. Every single record has to be stored. However data handling has come a long way. Some firms prefer doing it the old fashioned way with files and filing cabinets and some companies prefer using registers and just writing everything down and a minority of the companies today actually use a computer to store programs. Dubai English School currently store all their records in files and these files are then locked in a filing cabinet. Dubai English School being a reputed school in the region receives no forms of stiff competition from other schools. This means that a vast majority of the children in Dubai come to this school, which means more records. However it is a common known fact that however easy it is to store files in a cabinet it is not very easy to actually refer to them. This is precisely the problem facing Dubai English School.
Dubai English School although being at the forefront of education is not very technologically advanced. The school has only 3 computers and that too for administrative use. All of these computers run on Intel Pentium I 133MHz processors, which are obviously insufficient for power use and for extensive data storage. One computer only is being used by the headmaster’s personal secretary and this computer is being used to produce all the documents and leaflets of the school. This would include notices to parents to the school book list. The other two computers are made use of by the administrative department of the school and these computers are used to handle the schools financial records and also to produce school documents. None of these computers have sufficient hard disk space for extensive storage of data and they do not have the sufficient processor speed to process and handle this data like for example to run queries or to merge databases.
After completing this brief overview of the school I decided to complete a thorough analysis of the current system of the school and in doing so I hope to locate the problems, which I hope to rectify.
Current Working Of The System and the Problems Faced
Dubai English School, although having a lot of data to be dealt with, the working of the school can be categorized into two simple sections. These sections are:
- Administration
- Academic
The administration sector as the name suggests handles all the administration. This would include the creating and distributing of documents, the admission of new students and teachers as well and also the management of the school staff details. The administration sector and the management of the school set a particular date for the admission of new students. On this date as parents come for admission, the administration hands each parent an admission form where the details of the student will be written down. The parent then hands the form back to the administration and leaves. After the day of admission the office of the school gets down to work. Each admission form has to be sorted according to the sex and date of birth of the student. Therefore at the end of sorting the school would have two main piles of forms, one of boys and the other girls. With this pile the forms would be sorted out according to the date of birth of each child, which would decide the class, the student would be in. All this sorting has to be done by hand and there are hundreds of forms so this is obviously time consuming and inefficient. After this process of sorting and separating the forms are then handed to the headmaster for selection. Again the headmaster along with the management of the school has to go through all the forms to make a decision. This again is a waste of time leading to inefficiency. Also during this process of sorting or selection some forms can also be misplaced which is rather unfortunate. After the selection process is over and the forms of the students who are to be admitted are set aside and are then handed over to the administration sector again. The remaining forms are discarded. The selected forms have to be sorted again into girls and boys and according to the date of birth. This again is done manually and is very time consuming. After sorting the selected applicants, the administration prepares letters of acceptance for each of the students and are then mailed. Telephone calls are also made to the respective parents as a form of confirmation. However this is the first part of selection. For the final selection, the students are asked to come to the school for an interview and based on the selected applicants, the parents are asked to fill in a form again which would contain all the details of the admitted student. This form is then handed to the headmaster who has the job of assigning a class for each of the selected applicants. After a class has been assigned, the forms are handed back to the administration and these forms are put into a file based on the class and sex. These files are then put into a filing cabinet. That completes the administration of a new student. These forms of the new students are put into a file, which would contain the records of current students as well. From this we can see how a simple process of admitting a new student is done so laboriously largely due to the fact that everything has to be done by hand. However the problems do not end here. If for example a particular student changes residence, then obviously he would have a new telephone number and this change has to be made in the form, which has been filed. However erasing the current number in the form and writing it again is a messy job therefore the administration has to fill out a new form with similar details and make the change. This again is time consuming. Also there is always the possibility of making an error while writing out the form again and this could again cause further confusion. Finally when the student arrives at school he is also asked to hand in his medical card as the school clinic also handles medical details. A special file is kept aside for this to handle all the students medical details, which would include the injections they have received, and the diseases they have been affected with.
