Background to ENROL

In 2005, the Ministry of Education received funding to begin the development and implementation of a new electronic enrolment management system (ENROL) for schools to replace the paper-based student enrolment forms with a web application and online registry. The driver for this initiative was the time consuming, inefficient enrolment processes undertaken by schools and the ministry that often resulted in inaccurate information about non-enrolled students (those absent from school for more than 20 consecutive days) being sent to the ministry.

The project was part of the Student Development and Data Exchange (SEDEX) projects that focused on reducing schools' administration costs and time and allowing quality sharing between schools, the ministry and education sector agencies.

The goals of the ENROL development were to:

• facilitate immediate access to enrolment information and establish a consistent and accurate enrolment process;
• reduce the paperwork and monitoring effort for schools;
• automate a number of activities, eg monitoring the 20 days from leaving one school to enrolling at another; and
• reduce the number of inaccurate non-enrolment notifications (NETS) and the time taken to identify and respond to non-enrolled students.

Implementation was undertaken in three phases to manage the impact of a significant change in process in schools, and the risks associated with the implementation of information systems across the large user base of nearly 2,700 schools. Only authorised users are able to access and update ENROL.

Phase One began in 2005 with designing the system in consultation with representatives from primary, intermediate and secondary schools. All intermediate, secondary and restricted composite schools were included in Phase One.

An evaluation of the benefits from Phase One was undertaken in early 2007.

Phase Two covered the implementation of ENROL across all remaining schools, including primary, The Correspondence School, kura kaupapa and composite schools. This was completed by the end of 2007.

An evaluation of phases two and three took place in April 2009.