- It seeks to improve the quality of the management of education by promoting participation and involvement between agents
- The initiative will integrate around 2,500 centres and almost 2 million users including staff, students and families
The Agencia de Informática y Comunicaciones of the autonomous region of Madrid (ICM) commissioned Indra, the premier IT company in Spain and a leading IT multinational in Europe, the implementation of the platform for the integration, centralisation and coordination of the academic management of around 2,500 pre-school, primary and secondary education centres and non-standard schools.
The project, for 15.8 million Euros, seeks to improve the quality of the education by promoting the relationship between the Administration and the centres with parents and students. It also includes the implementation of tools to support inspection and education followup.
This is the first initiative worldwide to integrate an academic management system in the different education levels of a region with over one million students.
The new platform will be based on SAP's SLCM (Student LifeCycle Management) solution and will be integrated in +Educación, a portal of the Autonomous region of Madrid. It aims to support the needs of almost 2 million users including staff, students and parents. This way, teachers will have access to tools to manage absences, record evaluations, tutorships or student followup. The platform will help expedite administrative work, admission, registration, issuing of certificates or validations. The inspection team will also receive support in the evaluation of centres and generation of centralised reports. It will have a global vision of the progress of education in the region.
On the other hand, the platform aims to promote the different communication channels between the centre and students and families in order to reinforce direct involvement of students and parents in the education system. Followup of registration, admission, academic performance, absences or school records can be accessed via internet. Moreover, it will provide access to information regarding scholarships or vacancies at centres and proactive communication with the administration.
Unique and integrated vision of the student's school records
The incorporation of all this information in the “student's unique record” will offer a vision of the student's life to the different agents involved in the education system from the registration to the end of the secondary education. It will provide academic performance information and all documents in digital version (certificates, admissions, registrations, etc.) Besides this, in the case of transferred students, their records will be automatically integrated in the centre. This way, the staff of the centre will have a global vision of the new student and everything related to the former school without additional procedures.
Procedures between students and families with the centre will be oriented to reinforce the electronic administration in Madrid, that is, reduce paper consumption and to guarantee inclusion of recorded data by default in the relevant forms. The student's school record and the rest of the procedures will be digitalised and managed with the required security standards.
Indra has broad experience in the design, development and implementation of integral management systems for the education sector. The company, under the guidance of the Generalitat Valenciana, started up Itaca, an innovative project for integral academic management of all the members of the Valencian education system. It also developed Agrega, a project promoted by several public administrations and part of the Avanza plan through a cooperation agreement between Red.es, an entity within the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, the Ministry of Education and the Autonomous Regions. The project aims to offer and promote high-quality educational digital content to meet the didactic and pedagogical needs of the teachers.
Finally, the IT company cooperated with ICM in the development of the +Education portal of the region of Madrid and in the education portal of the Autonomous Government of Castilla-La Mancha. Indra is also responsible of the maintenance of the education systems of the Department of Education of Galicia's regional government.
Indra is the premier Information Technology company in Spain and a leading IT multinational in Europe and Latin America. It is ranked as the second European company in its sector according to stock market capitalisation, and also the second Spanish company with the most investment in R&D. In 2009, revenues reached € 2,513 M, of which a third came from the international market. The company employs more than 29,000 professionals and has clients in more than 100 countries.