Reduce duplicate school record entry

Where does duplicate school record entry actually come from?

Duplicate school record entry rarely comes from one system failing. It is usually the same fact arriving from several directions: an attendance mark taken on paper and keyed in later, a behaviour note written in a book and summarised into a report, a pupil’s new address told to the office and also typed into a class list. Each copy is created by a person, for a reason that made sense when it started.

So the first piece of work is a count, not a purchase. Take one fact that matters, such as an authorised absence, and follow it. Who records it first, and on what? Where does it go next, how many times is it typed, and by whom? What has to happen when it turns out to be wrong? A school that can answer those questions can judge a vendor’s claim. A school that cannot will be shown a screen and asked to imagine the rest.

The word for what the count is looking for is the authoritative record, also called the source of record: in this site’s glossary, the agreed place whose value counts as current and correct when several screens, messages or systems show related information. Where a fact is first created and where it is authoritative are two separate questions, and one interface covering both does not by itself prove there is a single source of record. A school that knows where its authoritative records are can say what a platform would actually replace. Software does go unused at scale: UNESCO’s 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report records that in the United States “an average of 67% of education software licences were unused and 98% were not used intensively”.

The blank version of this table, with the six vendor questions and a place to date each answer, is in the duplicate entry count sheet.

Read the glossary definition of an authoritative record →

What does the workload evidence say about data entry in schools?

The workload evidence says the burden of data entry in schools is real, and that its worst part is purpose rather than typing. The figures come from Making data work, the report of the Teacher Workload Advisory Group chaired by Professor Becky Allen, published by the UK Department for Education, November 2018. It is guidance to schools in England, not Malaysian law, and it is specific about the burden rather than any product.

Its problem definition records that the Workload Challenge in 2014 “identified unnecessary tasks linked to assessment and data with 56% of respondents citing tasks around ‘recording, inputting, monitoring and analysing data’ as burdensome”. It is careful about scale: it says time on data collection and analysis “is not as significant as other parts of a teacher’s job, such as marking and planning”, but that “it is most frequently cited as the most wasteful due to a lack of clarity amongst teachers as to its purpose”.

The most-wasteful line is the one to take into a vendor meeting. One line of the report’s Annex B advice to school and trust leaders sets the test: they should “minimise or eliminate the number of pieces of information teachers are expected to compile”. Does this platform reduce the number of pieces of information a teacher compiles, or does it move them to a screen?

The report is also honest about its own limits. It says it “does not, and cannot, tell schools how best to manage data in their own context”, because schools are too different from one another for catch-all rules. Read it as a set of questions, not as a specification.

Which questions find duplicate entry before a school buys?

Six questions find duplicate entry before a school buys, and they are for any vendor, including Easy Edu. Ask them in writing and keep the answers with their dates, because a verbal yes in a meeting is not a record and the person who answered may not be the person who implements. Each one is written to produce a fact a school can check rather than a reassurance it has to accept.

1. Which facts are entered once? Not “is the platform integrated”, but: name this list of facts, and tell us for each one where it is created and which screens read it rather than re-ask for it.
2. What happens on a correction? If the first entry was wrong, who may change it, what else changes with it, and who is told? A platform that copies a fact forward but not a correction has made duplicate entry worse, not better.
3. What does a teacher still type twice? Ask for the honest list. Every platform has one, and a vendor who says there is none has not looked.
4. Which of this is released in the package we would buy? Released in this offer, configured for the demo, an illustrative concept such as a mockup, or planned with a date. Four statuses, one answer per screen, and how to tell a concept screen from a verified feature sets out how to make that answer stick.
5. What comes in from elsewhere, and what goes out? If the school keeps a separate finance or government return, ask what the import and export actually carry, in which format, and who runs them.
6. What happens offline? If a mark is taken where there is no connection, is it entered on paper and keyed in later, which is duplicate entry by design, or does the platform hold it and sync?

Notice that none of these asks for a time saving. A claimed saving is a number about someone else’s school, measured in conditions a buyer cannot see. The same UNESCO report records that in a survey of teachers and administrators across 17 US states “only 11% requested peer-reviewed evidence prior to adoption”, and that the EdTech Genome Project found “85% of some 7,000 pedagogical tools, which cost USD 13 billion”, were “either a poor fit or implemented incorrectly”. Asking for evidence is the unusual behaviour, which is the argument for doing it.

How should a school test an “enter it once” claim in a demo?

A school tests an enter-it-once claim by following one record through in front of the vendor, rather than by watching a sequence of screens. The test has four steps and a deliberate mistake in the middle. What it produces is not an impression of the platform but a written answer to one question: when this fact changes, does everything that holds a copy of it change too?

1. Create it in the role that really creates it. A teacher, on the device that teacher uses, under the connection the classroom actually has.
2. Read it in every role that needs it. The office, a year leader, and a parent or guardian if the school intends them to see it. Ask what each role sees, not whether each role has access.
3. Get it wrong on purpose, then correct it. Change the record and watch what updates, what does not, and who receives a notification. This is the step that separates a working claim from a demonstration.
4. Take it out. Export the record and the correction, and look at the file. If the export loses the correction history, the school’s own record of what happened lives only in the vendor’s system.

Write each result down as it happens, with the date and who saw it, and leave anything unanswered open with a named owner rather than turning it into an assumption. The demo question set covers how to run the session and what the written record should hold, and data ownership, export and deletion covers what the export has to carry. Easy Edu’s own site presents one school day from the teacher, student and parent viewpoints as a design direction, so treat those screens and the copy around them as illustrative and ask for the product record in writing exactly as you would of anyone else.

How can a school reduce duplicate entry without buying software?

A school reduces duplicate entry without buying software by removing collections rather than automating them, and Making data work is blunt about where to look. It advises that school and trust leaders should have “simple systems that allow behaviour incidents, detentions and other pastoral information to be logged during the normal working day, rather than at break and lunchtimes, wherever possible”, which is a statement about when information is captured as much as where.

The same report advises that school and trust leaders should not have “more than two or three attainment data collection points a year”, and adds that “increasing assessment frequency is not inherently likely to improve outcomes for pupils”. A school that collects attainment data six times a year will type it six times whatever platform it buys.

Beneath both pieces of advice sits the report’s set of four principles for evaluating data use in schools, addressed to schools establishing data systems “whether paper or technology-based”: that the purpose of a collection, and who it is for, is clear; that the precision and limitations of the data are understood; that the amount collected and the frequency of collection are proportionate; and that school and trust leaders review the processes for collecting the data and for using it once gathered. A school that applies those four to its own collections walks into a vendor meeting with a shorter list, which is the cheapest reduction available.

How information moves between school roles is the guide that sits above this one, and the onboarding checklist picks up after a decision is made.