Student Record Transfer (SRT)

Overview

Student Record Transfer (SRT) is software that allows schools to transfer a comprehensive student record (about 150 pieces of key enrolment and academic information about a student) from one school's Student Management System (SMS) to another at the push of a button.

The Ministry has developed the SRT specification in response to an expressed need from schools for information from different systems to follow the student. A lot of staff time is spent re-keying data into the SMS to support the movement of student transfers. But now, when SMS vendors have developed the SRT functionality following the Ministry’s specifications, SRT will be able to work for any New Zealand school, no matter which SMS they are using.

The goal is to have the SMS, ENROL and SRT seamlessly synchronised with very little need for visiting the ENROL front-end or double handling any data. SRT is the final piece in this system integration and when is used in many schools it will substantially reduce the administrative effort involved with transferring students.

Advantages of SRT

Some of the advantages of using SRT include:

• Timeliness. Information about students transferring between schools is available earlier to schools to assist with planning.
• Savings. There is a time (and associated cost) saving for the school because the transfer of student data is automated.
• Richer information. Much richer information is available (eg academic record and attendance) that cannot be obtained from a parent-completed enrolment form.
• Better decision-making. Schools can make more informed decisions about resource requirements, staffing, timetabling etc, because more data will be made available to the destination school via SRT than the current manual method.
• Better planning. SRT will allow schools to plan and timetable earlier by giving a better idea breakdown of incoming student numbers.
• Reduced administration. SRT will reduce the administration burden – school staff will no longer have to enter the same information twice.
• Better preparation. By transferring some key assessment data and attendance data, schools will also be able to adapt lesson plans to the new students’ needs.
• Security. By using SRT the information is sent in a secure manner and all transfers and all activity are carefully logged both in SRT and in the school's SMS.
• Accuracy. If the data has been accurately entered into the senders’ SMS, SRT will ensure all data that arrives is accurate.
• Quality data. SRT will also raise awareness around importance of quality data and consistency across all systems in the education sector.

Who and when

KAMAR, PC School and eTAP schools are able to use SRT now. Other vendors are expected to come on board in 2011/12. The specifications are publicly available on the Data Sharing Yahoo Group.

To find out more about when your school can use SRT, either talk to your SMS vendor or contact the SMS Services Team by email MLE.Project@minedu.govt.nz or phone 04 463 7666. The data sharing initiatives summary table has details of when vendors are developing this feature.

The adoption of SRT should be driven by the school's principal and leadership team. The person responsible for the ENROL uploads for the school also needs to be involved. There is no need to have an ICT person involved as the adoption of SRT won't need detailed technical knowledge - the technical aspects will be taken care of by the school's SMS vendor. However schools may wish to involve their ICT person, especially if the school has not yet used the Get/Check NSN, ENROL Leavers or ENROL Arrivers functionality in the SMS.

Technical pre-requisites

In order to be able to use SRT, schools need to be able to do an ENROL Get/Check from their SMS first. If the school is not using Get/Check yet, please talk with your SMS vendor before attempting to use SRT.

Using the automated ENROL Leavers and Arrivers functionality in your SMS is not a pre-requisite to using SRT, but schools benefiting from SRT should also consider using Leavers and Arrivers.

Privacy and informing the community

SRT has been developed with the 12 principles of the Privacy Act (1993) and the Education Act (1989) in mind, and an independent privacy assessment has been conducted. Student information is secure and any potential misuse can result in prosecution.

A good resource around privacy is "Privacy in Schools: A guide to the Privacy Act for principals, teachers and boards of trustees" available on the Privacy Commissioner's website (page 31 of this document talks about the transfer of records between schools).

The collection and transfer of ENROL data does not require parental permission. However the SRT data is much richer and it is possible that some parents may request that this data set is not made available electronically to other schools. For this reason, schools planning to use SRT should make their parent community aware of the existence and scope of the SRT initiative.

The SRT record does not contain any sensitive information. Furthermore, student records will not be sent via SRT if a privacy flag in ENROL has been set (if there are any issues or concerns for a particular student). If there are legal or privacy considerations about the student (eg sensitive custody information) which means the student’s record should not be transferred, the school will need to take action and raise an ENROL privacy flag for that student.