Background
Camden Haven Community College (CHCC) was established as a Registered Training Organisation (RTO) in 1997, and since this date has been a prominent education provider within the broader NSW community. The college is non-for-profit and community owned. Because of this, CHCC’s first and foremost priority is to provide services and training that focus on giving back to both the local residents and their natural environment. CHCC achieve this through a number of services, such as their community garden. The CHCC community garden is supported by volunteers and used as a method to provide training in sustainable landcare and nutrition to their students. CHCC is also the trust manager for the Camden Head Pilot Station, which provides accommodation, artist and writer residencies and community, environmental and cultural events.
However, most importantly CHCC deliver a number of Vocational Education and Training options (VET) and lifestyle courses to the local community.
Since its establishment, CHCC has had approximately 17,000 student enrolments. These enrolments are predominantly made up of individuals looking to enhance their skills and training in order to gain employment or to comply with workplace requirements. Thankfully, the wide range of training options that CHCC offer ensure students can find what they’re looking for, with Training and Assessment areas offered in Business, Business Administration (Medical), Foundation Skills, Horticulture, Hospitality, Food Safety and Technology and Training. To date, CHCC’s most popular course is Certificate III in Individual Support (Ageing). Employment for students who’ve successfully completed the course has been close to 100%.
Solutions
As CHCC began to expand their course offerings and experienced a steady influx of new student enrolments, they realised they needed a more comprehensive student management system to keep up to date with the varied compliance requirements of their growing student base.
CHCC’s biggest priority was to have effective and efficient reporting tools in place, so that their mandatory student data reports were compliant. Because a big aspect of aXcelerate’s functionality revolves around reporting, CHCC made the decision to partner with our AVETMISS software in 2013. The transition from one system to another always has some difficulties; CHCC had to invest time into learning a new system and change certain business processes. However, the support and training aXcelerate provided ensured CHCC’s move to aXcelerate was successful overall and relatively low stress.
As CHCC has embraced the system over the years, they have discovered numerous administrative benefits to tasks that they used to perform manually. These included sending bulk emails to whole classes or an automatic SMS and email function to particular students. Because reporting is such a significant aspect for aXcelerate clients, aXcelerate embarked on a project to further enhance their reporting features. This decision was fuelled by the feedback aXcelerate received from a number of clients, including CHCC. The ‘New Report Builder’ was released last year and CHCC has since become one of our key clients using the feature for their reporting requirements. The additional fields, chart options, and areas to report on, have greatly assisted CHCC with their sector requirements for both student and data reports. The added fields and reporting options have also allowed CHCC to create a thorough record of student activities for planning, internal reporting and auditing purposes.
Looking to the Future
aXcelerate are committed to CHCC and to ensuring that our reporting functionality is meeting their compliance needs. Part of this process will be working closely with CHCC over the coming months to develop some customised reports, so that they have greater flexibility when reporting on particular student activities. CHCC are always open to new ideas and improvements and have been instrumental to aXcelerate in providing feedback on new features or suggesting ways to further improve the system. They hope to utilise more areas of aXcelerate as they continue to grow their successful business and we look forward to supporting them during this time.
To find out more about Camden Haven Community College and the services they offer, feel free to visit their website: http://www.chace.org.au/
