Whether it's sports, music, performing arts or debating and mathletics – extra curricular activities are a huge part of a student’s school experience; and so they should be!
Research has shown that extra curricular participation results in positive youth development, improved self-esteem, better communication, and greater time-management skills.
Extra curricular activities also tend to have a positive impact on academic performance and school attendance – all while developing and refining a new skill.
Having well-managed extra curricular activities can also help your school standout and boost enrolments.
The TASS team established an Advisory Group of 7 schools to help understand the complexities around the coordination of Extra Curricular programs, and how they manage them. This is what they said:
1. Extra-Curricular Overload
Students live busy lives. Finding time to study, balancing their home and social life, making decisions about their future, and often working a part-time job is a lot to handle on its own – but factor in additional extra curricular commitments, and it can often cause a responsibility overload.
Studies have shown that academic pressure can have serious negative consequences. It is important for your student’s mental and physical wellbeing, to find a healthy balance between extra curricular activities and schoolwork.
However, avoiding clashes with class time is sometimes not an option, particularly when it comes to private music lessons that can occur sporadically throughout the day.
But even if a lesson needs to fall during class time, there’s still plenty to consider such as:
- A student’s preferences of what lesson to disrupt
- Upcoming assessments
- Accessibility and transport options
- Time and length of lessons and training
Finally, don’t be afraid to be flexible. Students have a lot going on – you might have to make changes on-the-fly and that’s okay.
2. Duty of Care
Another common problem that can arise is class attendance and the confusion that conflicting commitments can cause when determining student whereabouts.
From the teacher’s perspective - they have a duty of care to the students in their classroom, and when one doesn’t show up to class at rollcall they have an obligation to find out why.
If a teacher does not have access to the extra curricular timetable of their students, it causes unnecessary effort and stress on both teachers, and administration staff.
To avoid inundating your student office with calls from teachers trying to track down certain students, consider consolidating your extra curricular schedules with your curriculum timetable in a common database, to ensure staff can immediately verify attendance and identify student whereabouts.
3. Maintaining Student Privacy and Access to Student Information
Maintaining student data privacy is everyone’s job, and for anyone that comes to work at your school, what level of access they have to student information should be carefully considered.
Ensuring that sensitive information doesn’t end up in unintended hands is extremely important when it comes to managing internal school systems and their security permissions.
When examining what information should be available, consider the exposure that each external employee has to students, and the ‘chain of command’ in terms of responsibilities.
Some scenarios might be:
- External tutors and coaches who only work with a specific subset of students.
- Consider limiting system access to visibility over these students only.
- Consider limiting system access to visibility over these students only.
- How much information do external tutors and coaches actually need?
- They may only need access to generic student details such as student names, calendars and student email addresses.
- They may only need access to generic student details such as student names, calendars and student email addresses.
- Extra curricular coordinators on the other hand may need access to more information, to support their responsibilities around attendance, scheduling and communication with both students and parents.
- For student safety, anyone in charge of a team or group of students should be able to access medical alerts and emergency contacts details - while keeping all other medical data private.
Our Advisory Group members stressed how important it was that external extra curricular staff have access to the school’s internal systems, but how data security and ensuring systems are not just ‘open access’ is essential.
Want to know what to do in case of a data breach? Check out our blog.
4. Sign-up Processes
Sign-up day is one of the busiest days of the year for Extra Curricular Coordinators. With hundreds of students signing up for extra curricular sports and music, it's no wonder that it can get a bit hectic at times. Luckily, there are ways to make this process easier.
Modernise! Quit living in the stone age with paper sign-up forms, permission slips and excel spreadsheets - move online instead. This way students and parents can sign-up and teams can be allocated all in one central location.
With online sign-up you should be able to control the maximum number of students for any activity, creating a ‘first in first served’ approach, and minimising the administration of collating and approving applications.
An online approach can also provide greater control over the mandatory data and documentation that is collected at the time of sign-up, such as verifying medical details and accepting the school’s sporting codes of conduct and terms and conditions.
5. Up-to-Date Data
Having up-to-date data is one of the most important aspects of record keeping.
Destroy the spreadsheets!
Spreadsheets are one of the most common methods for organising student extra curricular lists, however updating a spreadsheet will not update the school’s records and main central database.
It also means that other people around the school cannot use that information for other tasks, such as displaying Extra Curricular participation on Academic Reports.
Using one central database for this information will ensure accuracy across faculties, prevent double handling of data, miscommunication, data consistency errors and a whole lot of effort.
Using the school’s contact database (instead of excel maintained contact lists) also makes dissemination of information much easier. Match cancellations, training schedules, concert information, and anything else that is important for students and parents to know, can be sent out knowing it will be received.
With a dedicated Extra Curricular Management System, you can easily schedule activities, hold student participation and enrolment data, access relevant student information and set up permissions for who can access what. Plus, you can ditch the mountain of excel spreadsheets!
Extra curricular activities have seemingly endless benefits to student development, so it’s a no-brainer that your sport and music programs stay organised, up-to-date and well managed.
TASS would like to give a big thanks to the schools who participated in our Advisory Group – and whose feedback was crucial to the development of our own Extra Curricular Management system.
