SOCS is used by leading schools in the UK and across the world to manage and communicate sports and co-curricular activities. SOCS also offers a comprehensive online school calendar solution that integrates with the sport and co-curricular modules that are used by nearly 800 schools worldwide.
SOCS has worked with Epsom College for almost 12 years, first providing a tool to manage the extensive sports programme the school offers. During this time, SOCS has evolved into a comprehensive school calendar system, and Epsom now use SOCS to easily run activity sign-ups, communicate team and club schedules and take registers. To use a common example, SOCS allows Epsom to identify when a pupil has an activity clash; for example, they are signed up to drama activity but have been added to a last-minute rugby practice.
It has been a fruitful working relationship for both SOCS and Epsom College.
Andy Bustard, who is the Assistant Head in charge of the Total Curriculum at Epsom, said: “Epsom simply couldn’t operate without SOCS. The systems are all user-friendly, intuitive to operate and enormously time-saving.
“We don’t know what we would do without SOCS. Parents love the sport module, as accessing team sheets, directions to matches and reading results and match reports adds significantly to their matchday experience.
“At Epsom we have a huge array of activities and we run 18 50-minute periods across the week where these take place. The co-curricular module enables the pupils and staff to run this huge breadth of activity and to coordinate it all effectively and efficiently, monitoring attendance and participation levels with ease. SOCS co-curricular and sport manage our 200+ games and activities sessions across the week.”
Adopting the SOCS calendar has meant that as soon as events are added into the SOCS co-curricular or SOCS sport platforms by staff, they appear on the main school calendar, removing dual entry and providing parents with a single destination they can head to when they need to know what is going on with their children outside academic hours. The SOCS calendar can be customised to look like the rest of the school’s website, to ensure branding guidelines are followed throughout.
Much like using two monitors on your desktop, once you have the SOCS applications you wonder how on earth you managed without them
Mr Bustard added: “The SOCS calendar is simple to operate and synchronises with the SOCS sport module, loading and amending fixtures onto the calendar simultaneously to save time. Parents love the mobile apps that enable updates to their children’s sports teams, their activity programme and the College calendar in a simple format.”
His kind words extend to cover the SOCS customer service, something that the family run company is extremely proud of.
He said: “The people at SOCS are exceptionally helpful, from the sales team explaining the benefits of various products, to being receptive to amending their programmes to suit the majority of schools, while their customer service is first-rate, quick to respond and to help out.
“Much like using two monitors on your desktop, once you have the SOCS applications you wonder how on earth you managed without them.”
James Kershaw-Naylor, Business Development Director at SOCS, said: “It has been a great privilege and challenge to work with a school that offers such a broad range of sport and co-curricular activities. We knew from the start that if we could deliver a successful platform to a school like Epsom, we would have a system robust enough to handle any co-curricular programme in the world.”
He concludes with his hopes for the future: “We know Epsom will continue to deliver an exceptional co-curricular programme to their students and we hope to continue to work with the school, offering exceptional calendar and activities software to Epsom College.”
For more, visit www.misocs.com or email sales@misocs.com.
