Hills Road Sixth Form College SharePoint Case Study
Streamlining the student hand-in process at an 'Outstanding' Cambridge college.
Case Study Overview
Fuse undertook a custom software project to make submission management easier for staff and students who take part in the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ). The document management system was built using the Microsoft products SharePoint Online, SharePoint SPFX, Power Automate, and Excel.
Our client, Hills Road Sixth Form College, is a specialist sixth form college based in Cambridge, UK. It was recently rated “Outstanding” by Ofsted and has a proud record of academic excellence, outstanding learning experiences and enrichment opportunities.
The Extended Project Qualification (EPQ)
One aspect of being a student at Hills Road College is taking part in the EPQ initiative in year 12. The qualification is equivalent to half an A level and allows each student to choose their own topic to pursue, encouraging independent learning and working and preparing them for higher education and employment. The College is distinct in that 100% of their students take the EPQ, so the cohort size is approximately 1300 students per year.
Each student is required to take their chosen project from “drawing board to delivery”, monitoring their own progress and recording evidence before presenting their final submission which could be a dissertation, artefact, performance, event or anything else that represents the culmination of their efforts.
Customer Feedback
- Will save us weeks of time
- Very intuitive
- Highest quality
- 100% Customer focussed
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Very pleased
- Elegant solution
EPQ Programme Challenges
The EPQ presented a number of administrative challenges to staff at Hills Road. All students are required to upload several files and a video which captures their submission.
Staff were experiencing challenges with issues such as:
- Keeping track of students’ progress through the project
- Knowing who had missed deadlines
- Easily being able to provide external markers with a whole class’s submissions
- Providing a secure system where students could only see their own progress and submissions
- Ensuring the files were stored in secure, robust storage (with off-site backup)
- Having an audit trail of who made changes to content and when
- Bottlenecks and scalability issues with students all handing in within a short window at specific times of the year
- Needing to send out notification emails confirming receipt of each student’s submitted files
- Sending out emails to all students who miss the given deadline date
- Restarting the programme each year with a clean slate and a fresh cohort of students
Additionally, the college were keen to present a simple and intuitive interface through which the students upload their documentation and view their progress.
Pre-Project Overview of IT Environment
The College already leverages Office 365 and had previously implemented a minimal solution for the EPQ using SharePoint Online. Although it fulfilled some of the system criteria, it was only ever meant to be a stop-gap solution. It did however provide enough benefits to suggest that SharePoint and Office 365 were the right platform for the solution, but it would need a bit of additional expertise to help mould it into a system that delivered all the requirements, and potentially more.
Fuse's Bespoke SharePoint Solution for the EPQ
Fuse were approached by the College early in 2022 and we then had several conversations discussing the existing challenges, requirements, and the potential solutions available to them as Office 365 customers. Fuse have delivered many solutions on the 365 platform and specifically SharePoint over the years and had also previously implemented a solution for a fairly similar scenario at another school a couple of years earlier.
The solution can be broken down into four main features; storage, user interface, automation, and reporting.
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What did our customer say?
This new system is a big upgrade from the manual system in place before. Providing greater efficiencies for both students and staff. All using software they already had available to them, so no additional license fees either. For students, they now have an easy-to-follow process, with inline guidance provided, and no excuses for not delivering on-time.
Read some of our delighted customer comments below:
We were delighted with the work that Fuse carried out for us. From the initial meetings and right through the process of developing and delivering a solution to meet our needs, their approach was of the highest quality; 100% customer focussed with great attention to detail throughout. We are very pleased with the solution, and our staff and students have adopted its use with ease.
Jonathan Sansom – Director of Digital Strategy
James has listened carefully to our complicated requirements and actively worked with us to find an elegant solution that allows sophisticated behind the scenes management of large numbers of files, tagged with individual student identifiers. The front-end hand-in site is both aesthetically pleasing and very intuitive to use, and allows students to easily understand and check what work needs to be handed in, by which deadline and according to which particular file type restrictions. The end result looks like it will save us weeks of time, and we are excited to implement it.
Dr Nicolle McNaughton - Head of Extended Project
Products Used to Build Custom EPQ Student Submission System
- Microsoft Office 365
- Microsoft SharePoint Online
- Microsoft SPFX framework
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft Power Automate
Benefits of Using Fuse for Custom Software Solutions
- Previous experience creating a similar product gave Hills Road Sixth Form College confidence in the process and final product.
- Staff and students are experiencing the ease-to-use interface on different devices which reduces stress.
- Proof of submission and secure storage reduces anxiety and improve trust between students and staff.
- All work was carried out using software the college was already paying for which kept costs down.
- Progress tracking gives staff the opportunity to pre-emptively intervene with struggling students, contributing to a higher success rate.
