Supporting pupil wellbeing with cloud native technology

The impact of multiple lockdowns and social isolation has been hard on many demographics across the globe, and studies have shown increasing rates of mental health concerns in young people.

After more than a year of disrupted education and lockdowns, it’s more important than ever to ensure effective systems and strategies are in place at your school, to help you identify wellbeing concerns and support pupils.

With education remaining somewhat disjointed, as pupils (or even entire year groups or schools), can be forced to work from home, recording events and contact on a digital platform is key in making sure no pupil slips through the cracks.

WCBS has been proactive within their product strategy, ensuring that wellbeing functionality is included at the core of HUBmis, but there are many more benefits to wellbeing than simply having a “wellbeing module”, and a major part of this is due to it being a cloud native solution.

So why is cloud native so important to wellbeing?

1. Easy to use, more likely to use!

I personally think this is the most important point: if the tool is clunky and frustrating, you won’t want to use it. Rather than logging immediately, if staff members wait until the end of the day (or even week) to log safeguarding or wellbeing concerns, how much information do you think is missed? User experience is so important to encourage adoption, and the easier events are to log, the faster a concern can be reviewed and escalated.

2. Distance learning with unparalleled communication

The school is no longer just on site and must find ways of making sure that even those unable to attend are still engaged and learning. Cloud native systems allow inclusion of everyone (staff, pupils and parents) in the wellbeing process to ensure a whole school approach. Communications can be securely sent through notifications, and information can be easily shared with all stakeholders to keep them in the loop.

3. It’s Online

Naturally, you get this benefit with all online systems, but the rapid scalability of a cloud native solution, along with guaranteed uptime, means that you never have a “system down” or sluggish performance when it really matters.

4. Data security and data backup

The data integrity and security of cloud native systems is imperative. Never before is so much data stored on pupils, with ever increasing reputational and financial penalties for data breaches and data integrity issues. Cloud native systems are built and hosted on top tier IaaS, meaning the gold standard in information security. Point in time recovery (meaning you can rewind time to literally any point) means that data is never lost or corrupted, simply rewind to seconds before the crisis occurred.

*TOP TIP* Be sure to ask your MIS provider how often their cloud solution is penetration tested (the act of employing independent, ethical hackers to try to break into the solution with the view to find vulnerabilities that can be fixed).

5. Strong integrations with third party tools

Cloud native systems are built to integrate with other tools, and so integration is easy between HUBmis and other third party technology. Data can be pulled out, played with and written back, without any additional work required. With stronger, read and write integrations through API, we’re now able to develop a solution to not just manage information, but to take data and provide significant educational value – using a best of breed solution, integrating across multiple, world class providers.

The Future of Cloud Native Wellbeing

At WCBS we believe that MIS should not be a commodity item, but instead one that adds significant value in aiding a school to deliver better outcomes for pupils. It’s through the next generation of cloud-native technology we are able to really change the MIS game, not only by providing a better user experience, or deeper integration, but also by making the most of data. Internally this is one of the areas we are most excited to explore and refer to it as Data and Insight.

This is where we will be able to take aggregated anonymised data from across our client base to produce valuable insight that can be shared with users to aid proactive engagement in areas that might match a specific pattern. This will allow for challenges and opportunities to be dealt with proactively, instead of being reactive.

HUBmis and Wellbeing

WCBS released our latest addition to our software portfolio with HUBmis, in October 2020. After investing

£5 million over 3 years, built from the ground up with the user in mind, HUBmis is the most technologically advanced MIS for international and independent schools.

Our wellbeing module allows real-time attendance and behaviour tracking, with instant reporting and detailed graphs, helps schools to keep on top of pastoral management and ensures pupils’ wellbeing isn’t getting overlooked. Parents can even access live records, giving them peace of mind when their child is away at school, with notifications from staff members to keep them informed and engaged with the whole school approach to wellbeing.