Case study — further education
University Foundation Programme: from spreadsheets and paper registers to a single portal
For more than 35 years, UFP has prepared students for some of the UK's leading universities, including King's College London, Imperial, UAL and UCL. A three-month build gave course directors, teachers and students one place to manage all student and teaching activity — from the day a student arrives to the day they leave for university.
The problem
UFP had relied on an internal system to manage student attendance and timetables for years. Eventually it became unreliable, then stopped working altogether — forcing staff back onto spreadsheets and printed sheets for everything.
Maintaining and updating data was time-consuming, finding the right information was difficult, and getting it to the people who needed it meant extra emails and phone calls. Staff routinely interrupted the admissions officer or principal just to check something that should have been a click away.
Off-the-shelf software existed, but none of it reflected how the college actually operated — and UFP didn't want to change established processes just to accommodate a piece of software.
What we built
We sat down with UFP to understand their requirements and pain points first, then built a system around the way they already worked — rather than asking them to adapt to ours. A single intranet portal serving three groups of users, with role-based access control so people only see what they should. It works just as well on a phone or tablet as on a desktop, so teachers can take a register in the classroom and students can check their timetable on the way in.
Course directors
Build timetables, create lessons and examinations, and assign students to them. Double-bookings are flagged as they happen, rather than found later.
Teachers & attendance officers
Record and correct attendance, with every change saved and every past record instantly retrievable.
Students & parents
Log in to see timetables, attendance, results and everything else relevant to them, in one place.
The analytics
Data the college was already generating, finally in one place.
The portal turns everything it captures into decision-making information: how individual students are performing, how the college performs over time, what admissions look like, and which marketing activity is working.
The results
- 3 months
- first conversation to going live, with weekly demos throughout
- ~20 staff
- using it daily
- ~100 students
- joining each year, each using it daily
Tasks that took hours now take minutes. Staff no longer print and re-enter attendance, or interrupt the admissions officer or principal for information that used to require a phone call or a walk down the corridor.
The analytics section gave UFP a clearer view of what was happening across the college — insight that has already fed into better marketing decisions and more applications to its courses.
“The Senmuru team took the time to understand our requirements and pain points, then built a system around the way we already worked — rather than asking us to change our processes to fit the software. It has made our day-to-day work easier and significantly improved the quality of our working lives. We would recommend Senmuru to any organisation looking to make its processes easier, more efficient and better organised.”
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