Introducing a new way to manage sports, clubs and activities

SOCS and Dulwich College have worked together since 2015. Initially SOCS provided the system to manage the college’s first-class sports programme. More recently the SOCS co-curricular and calendar modules were adopted by the school, bringing the management and communication of the co-curricular activities and events programme online. 

Simon Croucher is the assistant head co-curricular at Dulwich College. He oversaw the process of moving the college onto SOCS co-curricular and the SOCS calendar.

We now have a single calendar for all of our events. It’s a great bird’s-eye view of what’s happening across a large and vibrant organisation

He said: “Here at Dulwich College we run over 250 sports teams and over 600 clubs and societies a year. On any given day at the college there will be between five and 50 fixtures and as many as 80 activity clubs taking place. Scheduling these sessions, allocating students into teams and clubs, registering them and then reporting on them has always been a mammoth task.

“SOCS has made this so much easier and our students, staff and parents love it. The sports department began using SOCS sport successfully. The college then expanded their use into SOCS co-curricular before tying it all together with the SOCS calendar. We now have a single calendar for all of our events. It’s a great bird’s-eye view of what’s happening across a large and vibrant organisation.”

Moving to an online system requires skilful project management and is no mean feat for a school that operates at the scale of Dulwich College. The pace at which the college has been able to start using the full SOCS system has been phenomenal: the implementation took one academic term, demonstrating that the software is agile and flexible enough to adapt to the school’s needs.

As with any new system, the staff, students and parents need to be kept informed throughout the process. 

This means providing the appropriate training for staff, whilst students and parents are given clear and concise instructions on how to access the system. SOCS assisted with this along the way.

A great time-saving feature of the full SOCS system is that any events that are added into the SOCS co-curricular or the sport platforms by staff automatically appear on the main school calendar. This not only removes the need for dual entry by staff, but it also provides parents with a single destination to get the information they require. 

The public-facing components of SOCS can be customised to look like the rest of the school’s website, to ensure branding guidelines are followed throughout.

James Kershaw-Naylor, business development director at SOCS, said: “I have personally enjoyed working with Dulwich College. Their enthusiasm for modernising the school’s co-curricular processes and systems has been fantastic. Adopting SOCS has driven efficiency and consistency across the enormous range of co-curricular and sports offered at Dulwich. 

“This has allowed the college to view co-curricular activities from a central database, making it easy to spot when a pupil has a conflict between sports and drama for example, check attendance records and manage a student sign-up process. That they have managed this change over the course of one term speaks volumes about the simplicity of the SOCS system.”

Among many of the world’s leading schools, SOCS also works with Dulwich College’s educational partners overseas, including Dulwich College Beijing, Dulwich College Shanghai and Dulwich College Singapore.

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