Gateway College – Student Reporting, ILP & Attendance Management System

Gateway College, a large sixth form college in Leicester with around 1,450 students, required a secure bespoke web application to modernise their student reporting and tutorial management processes. Staff needed a single place to manage reports, attendance, targets, predicted grades and at-risk indicators.

With numerous staff across subjects, faculties and pastoral teams, the college wanted to replace fragmented spreadsheets and manual processes with a unified digital system capable of supporting academic, pastoral and administrative work.

Business Requirements

Gateway College needed a system that could:

• Allow subject teachers to enter academic student reports
• Allow tutors to write pastoral reports and tutorial notes
• Record and schedule one-to-one tutorials
• Set student targets with automated reminders
• Flag at-risk students and manage “on report” workflows
• Manage predicted grades for UCAS applications
• Track attendance using the college’s smartcard door system
• Send SMS messages to groups of students (subjects, tutors, faculties)
• Provide staff with full student profiles including ILP and attendance snapshots
• Give senior leadership digital dashboards showing college-wide performance

Solution

New Media Aid developed a secure internal web application known as GLIDE, hosted on the college’s own servers and integrated directly with their existing student management system.

GLIDE provided staff with a clear, easy-to-navigate interface for writing reports, tracking student progress and reviewing attendance information. Smartcard data was integrated to allow staff to see the exact times students and staff entered or left the building, including which doors they swiped through most recently.

The system’s dashboard tools allowed managers to review live performance metrics, attendance status, at-risk indicators and reporting progress across the entire college.

Results

The platform significantly streamlined the college’s reporting and ILP processes, allowing staff to access full student histories both on-site and remotely. The integration with smartcard-based attendance created a real-time view of student presence on campus, supporting safeguarding and pastoral care.

Although the college later moved to a new system following leadership changes, GLIDE served the organisation effectively for many years and demonstrated the value of a custom-built solution designed specifically for the needs of a modern sixth-form environment.

The experience gained from GLIDE continues to inform my approach to building secure, staff-friendly education systems with strong reporting, performance dashboards and attendance integration.