Bede’s is an independent coeducational day and boarding school for 13 to 18-year-olds set across 140 acres of the South Downs in East Sussex. With children hailing from over 40 different countries, our school community is extraordinarily diverse, both culturally and socially, and we pride ourselves on being leaders in the world of school-age pastoral provision.

We are restless innovators, always looking for ways to improve reporting and communication to enhance every aspect of what we do. Recent years saw us updating our Management Information Systems, in some cases away from paper-based systems, and as such we were looking for a welfare monitoring system to which all support and teaching staff could contribute.

We first learned about MyConcern after speaking to another school about the challenges of finding modern, user-friendly welfare systems. Seeking something that enabled us to proactively intervene, and which managed data sensibly, the MyConcern team visited us, trained us, and have been extremely responsive to any of our questions.

One of the most useful things about MyConcern was the way it took information from our previous systems, which included thousands of detailed entries from all staff involved in pastoral work.

Aside from saving a huge amount of time, and being extremely user-friendly, the way the system manages data makes working with organisations such as Children’s Services exceptionally quick and simple.

Moreover, for the Pastoral Team at the School, the system enables us to identify trends, spot patterns, and put systems into place to alleviate problems we might otherwise miss before they become pressing. This kind of utility has informed everything from our PSHE programme to the ways we communicate with parents and one another, and we are very happy with it indeed.

By adopting MyConcern we have:

• Centralised our record keeping
• Enabled all staff, both teaching and support, to easily enter any concern, however small, about any pupil
• Adopted a system which provides seamless pastoral oversight of children from 3 months, in our baby unit, to eighteen-year-olds ready to leave school
• Been able to use data to monitor trends and make proactive decisions
• Maintained the confidentiality of pupil information while ensuring that those staff who need information can have easy access to it