1 October 2010
COMPUBITS AT TES, OCT 2010
New Products, National Survey Launch
London: 1 October, 2010: The London-based Compubits Group launched an online performance tracking and reporting suite for secondary schools at TES today. The launch follows the successful introduction of SRS : Primary in January (2010). The company also used TES to launch its first Annual Teacher Survey, designed to investigate the wellbeing and work-life balance of often over-burdened teachers.
The new product, SRS : Secondary, is a fully hosted feature-rich online answer to the need for teachers to continually monitor pupil performance. Like the primary school product, SRS : Primary, it provides a wealth of easily accessible data to help teachers improve the quality of education in their schools. Both products benefit from being developed by a company with a significant 15-year heritage in web-based information management.
"We approach our online performance tracking and reporting products from two perspectives," explains Compubits Group MD, Pankaj Patel. "We investigate the market and talk to teachers to find out exactly what they need, then we bring all the skills we'd developed in the area of business-critical online information management to bear on the problem. The result is the SRS family of products – and it's outstanding: intuitive, informative, and a real benefit to schools."
The Compubits Annual Teacher Survey is available on the company website (compubits.com). Survey results will be published on the company's site in December (2010).
Compubits was established in 1992 and is a hardware and software support, licensing, consultancy and retail specialist. Headquartered in west London, it has a satellite office in Inverness and 30 employees, approximately two thirds of which are software engineers based at its development centre in Gujarat, India. The company has been working with schools in the state and private sectors for 15 years.
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1 October 2010
SRS : SECONDARY LAUNCH
New Product, New Features, Outstanding Heritage
London, 1 October 2010: SRS : Secondary, the secondary school online performance tracking and reporting product from Compubits, was launched at TES today (London Olympia, 1-2 Oct). The product enables secondary schools to securely manage all their performance tracking and reporting online, which the company estimates saves teachers up to 13 days in admin time a year, whilst increasing the quality of tracking and reporting information held in schools.
Like its sister-product, SRS : Primary, the new secondary school product is hosted on secure servers by Compubits and, in a typical installation, can be up and running in about three days without disrupting day-to-day life at school. Both reports and reporting criteria can be fully customised to an individual schools needs and historical reporting data held on spreadsheets such as MS Excel can be uploaded into SRS for an instant 'historical' perspective on pupil performance.
Due to the more complicated nature of reporting in secondary schools, SRS : Secondary boasts some features not found on the primary school product. These include: Classroom and School Event management and a group of easy-to-use calendar-related functions which make it simple for parents and pupils to book appointments with specific teachers by email if they have something to discuss.
"SRS : Secondary was a natural development for us," explains Compubits Group MD Pankaj Patel. "The secret of the SRS family of products is flexibility. We haven't imposed a solution, what we've done is develop a tool that meets the individual and particular reporting needs of every school and provides the solution that they need.
"In short, the SRS family of products puts the needs of the school first," concluded Patel.
Compubits has been working with the education sector for 15 years, providing custom-built networks, system support and maintenance services, desking solutions and education-specific products. The company's web-based data management expertise comes from its long association with the telecommunications sector were it develops and maintains major business critical information management systems.
Prices for SRS : Secondary depend on the number of pupils at a school, but start at £950 (ex-VAT) a year for a school with up to 1,000 pupils. SRS : Primary costs £600 (ex VAT) a year, with smaller schools being offered a 30% discount. There is a one-off set up fee of £150 (ex VAT) for SRS : Primary and £250 (ex VAT) for SRS Secondary.
Compubits was established in 1992 and is a hardware and software support, licensing, consultancy and retail specialist. Headquartered in west London, it has a satellite office in Inverness and 30 employees, approximately two thirds of which are software engineers based at its development centre in Gujarat, India.
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1 October 2010
ANNUAL TEACHER SURVEY LAUNCH
How Much Time Do Teachers Spend Tracking Pupil Performance?
What Do Teachers Think of their Work-Life Balance?
The Compubits Group, which developed the successful online performance tracking and reporting products SRS : Primary and SRS : Secondary, has today launched a 10 question survey designed to find out exactly how much time teachers spend tracking and reporting pupil progress. The survey can be accessed from the company's website (compubits.com) at http://www.compubits.com/education-school-tracking-reporting.php and the results will be published in December 2010.
"We know from the interest in our SRS products that teachers spend an enormous amount of time tracking and reporting on pupils, but as a leader in the online reporting sector we wanted to highlight the problem with hard data," explains Compubits Group MD, Pankaj Patel.
Compubits plans to run the survey every year, and expects to see a substantial decrease in the amount of admin time teachers spend recording pupil performance over the next five years.
"We all know that the web is making a real difference to daily life," adds Patel, "but sometimes it's difficult to actually prove it. One of the things we hope to show by running our survey every year is that better and more relevant information is being gathered, with less effort, as a direct result of modern technology."
Compubits estimates that its own online performance tracking and reporting system saves teachers up to 13 days admin time, but Patel is frank about this marketing claim: "We absolutely believe it's true," he says, "but it's anecdotal evidence based on conversations with the teachers who have tried SRS. As a responsible company we want to be able to prove what we know with hard data from all teachers, regardless of the way they currently do their reporting."
"The days of recording pupil performance by hand in a ledger, then panicking when there's and Ofsted inspection, are gone," concludes Patel. "Online tracking and reporting systems, such as SRS, have seen to that. With our annual survey, we hope to be able to prove it, and to demonstrate what hard-working and dedicated teachers we have here in the UK."
Compubits was established in 1992 and is a hardware and software support, licensing, consultancy and retail specialist. Headquartered in west London, it has a satellite office in Inverness and 30 employees, approximately two thirds of which are software engineers based at its development centre in Gujarat, India.
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January 2010
BACKGROUND: COMPUBITS GROUP
The Compubits Group was established in 1992 and is a hardware and software support, licensing, consultancy and retail specialist.
Headquartered in Southall, west London, it has a satellite office in Inverness and 30 employees, approximately two thirds of which are software engineers based at its development centre in Gujarat, India.
The Group currently consists of Compubits Solutions Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary based in India, Spheroid UK Limited, which trades as Compubits in the UK, supplying computer and related hardware and marketing software developed inside the Group and Compubits Support Limited, which supports software installations in some of the UK's largest companies.
Compubits Group is a Microsoft Certified Partner, has an annual turnover over £3M and predominantly works in the education, telecommunications and IT sectors.
The Group's five directors have an average age of 53. Four are based at the parent office in Southall: Manjeet Panesar, Dave Short, Pankaj Patel and Vijay Patel, who have backgrounds in telecommunications, software development and business development. The fifth director, Jas Panesar, is based in Gujarat and responsible for Compubits' Indian operations.
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