The British College of Brazil is an international day school located in São Paulo, catering for students aged 2-18 years.
The school ethos is to develop confident, open-minded, and ambitious leaders who make a positive difference to our global society.
Searching for a flexible and accessible international school data solution
What I think has been the most useful thing overall is that we’ve been able to bring all of our staff, student, and family data together in one place and it’s readily accessible. We can customise different levels of access for our different staff groups. It cuts down on a lot of staff time with no need to go and fetch information from different sources. The staff can do that as they need, according to their access level.
Watch the Q&A with The British College of Brazil
Watch the Q&A with The British College of Brazil
We caught up with Paul McDaniel, Head of Primary at the British College of Brazil to hear about their experience with iSAMS and our range of modules.
A primary and secondary school do operate on very different timetables, different lesson lengths, different day structures, and having multi-divisional timetables gives us the option to more accurately reflect what’s happening day to day with our staff. I can easily pull up a timetable now for my staff in the primary school.
Which iSAMS features do you use most often?
Personally, the Reporting Manager is something that I’ve spent a lot of time working on. It’s really helped me to organise assessment across the primary school to make that a much more seamless process, from teachers entering data into iSAMS – that then is stored over the long term. We can go back and look at that in subsequent academic years. We can feed that into our reports.
What is your experience of iSAMS support and training?
I’ve always found support there when I’ve had a question or an issue. I’ve found iSAMS to be very very good. The response time is excellent from the help desk, whenever I’ve raised a query there. I always feel like someone’s going to be coming back to me very soon. They’ll keep me updated if it’s something that they’re going to have to go away and have a look at for me. I’ve always felt well supported in that respect.
“We recently had some training provided by iSAMS staff on the Wellbeing Manager that we recently added to our iSAMS. That was fantastic, it was very accessible and gave us all of the practical advice that we needed to get started with using the Wellbeing Manager. Everyone came away feeling confident that we could begin to use the platform from straight after the session.”
Are you integrating any new modules into your existing iSAMS system?
We’ve just added the Wellbeing Manager as a new module. That’s looking like something that’s going to become a really important part of what we do in terms of safeguarding and pastoral care for the children. Having that sort of information securely accessible to our safeguarding leads, and those members of the school community that need access to it, is going to be much better than our current paper-based system. We’re moving away from that to something more flexible and user friendly.
Having this central resource and hub of information for the students and their families was really useful, and having access to that even when you’re away from school is really important.