Veracross according to Barker College’s Director of Enrolments

At Barker College, relationships are at the heart of everything. Especially when it comes to prospective families. But before implementing Veracross, the school’s enrolments team faced significant challenges that impacted their ability to focus on connections and culture. 

We spoke with Fen Tonge, Director of Enrolments at Barker College, about the transformation that came with moving to Veracross. From unreliable systems and time-consuming processes to a faster, more efficient and data-driven approach, Fen shares how Veracross has empowered her team to work smarter and strengthen engagement with families. She reflects on the implementation experience, the positive partnership with Veracross, and how new efficiencies have opened space for strategy, innovation, and building community. 

For Barker, the change to Veracross has meant more than adopting new technology. It’s been about finding the tools that improve accuracy and set the foundation for a more connected future. 

Before you moved to Veracross, what were some of the challenges and frustrations you had, and how did they impact your day-to-day with students?  

The challenges that we had with our previous system revolved predominantly around how slow the system was and how unreliable it was. It took a very long time to do a simple process of accepting an offer and sending out an offer. It was very complicated. It wasn’t always reliable. Sometimes we thought we would be sending something out and it didn’t go. Sometimes the same thing went to many different families, which was a huge breach of our privacy policy. 

When you became involved in the decision to look for a new SIS, what were the non-negotiables? 

The reliability of the system, the timeliness of the system, and how reactive it could be. Time is absolutely critical for our team because we really want to focus on making connections with families, and to have the time to have those conversations.  

I’ll give you a very real-life example. To send out a confirmed place offer to a new student, in the old system that might have taken us 5 to 8 minutes. In Veracross, it takes us 30 seconds. In the period between September of last year and June of this year, we had just under a thousand registrations of which 200 were confirmed places. So that’s a huge time saver in terms of efficiency and productivity.  

That allows my team to spend more time on what is more important to the enrolments department, which is that connection with our prospective families. We value each and every family and student that comes through our mint gates. And it’s very important that we have the time to establish connection and culture early on. 

How did you and your team find the Veracross implementation process and the change to a new system? 

The implementation process I thought went fairly smoothly. As one of the first Australian schools to go into Veracross, I think it was a learning experience for both of us. But in terms of the actual implementation program, I really appreciated the amount of communication and the time spent with the team and myself to really map out what we needed.  

Did you see a willingness from Veracross to adapt to the needs of the local market? 

I can only speak about what we do within the enrolments department. So very high-level things like government reporting. Veracross was very supportive, and they provided us with the queries and the tools that we needed to ensure that we could run a government report. It wasn’t perfect. There were several learnings for next year when we have to do it again. But hopefully by next year it will be perfect, it will be streamlined, and it will be efficient. 

We do our census reporting in August of every year, and in the past, it was a complete nightmare. We would put aside a whole week to have it done. This year with Veracross, we managed to do it in about 30 minutes.  

Our enrolments team is very much solution focused. We inherently love the system. We acknowledge that there are challenges, but how can we pivot and find a solution that would work and be a good compromise? We worked very closely with the team and they were very open to understanding our process, which is quite detailed. We really enjoyed working with Veracross and I think it was a very positive experience.   

Does having Veracross give you more time to build community and think of other programs to differentiate yourself in this market?  

Yes, absolutely. As part of that differentiation, and in designing our admissions portal, we really want to be very intentional about our community engagement strategy. Many of our families take their places well in advance when their babies are born, sometimes 12 years in advance. So how do we remain connected to that community? How do we start sharing a little bit of who we are as a school, what our culture is? 

It’s a very emotive decision to make, and families are making it because they believe that our values align with their family values, that who we are as a school resonates with them. How do we continue to engage with them so that decision is well and truly affirmed and cemented? Having Veracross has given us time to think about what strategy we want to engage. It’s given us time to lift ourselves above and look at what it is that we actually need. It’s around being data driven and making strategic decisions around the data, being very intentional about it.  

Have there been any moments with the data that allowed you to reimagine some of your processes?  

I can now see where our students are located on a map. I’m now able to think, does that fit what we have in terms of bus routes where our prospective families are coming from? And how does that inform our decisions about our own future bus routes? It’s things like that, we never would have thought about in the past. So we’re being more proactive as opposed to being reactive.   

Do you feel that Veracross has improved communications and transparency with families?  

In terms of communication and transparency, it’s allowed our communication to be personalised, timely and accurate. It’s as simple as reducing the margin of error where communication is sent to the right family for the right child, for the right year group, for the right purpose. If we’re sending communication that’s got the wrong information, it doesn’t reflect well on who we are as a school.   

How do you feel about the future now that you are using Veracross?  

The future is exciting because of all the opportunities and options that we have available now. We’ve only just skimmed the surface of what Veracross can do. We don’t use a lot of the functionality within the enrolments suite. Now we’ve been given back the time to explore how we can tackle this process. How far Veracross can take it in tandem with the growth and development of AI and how we can marry the two processes up to have the opportunity for people-connection, which I think is what’s going to differentiate us from our competitors. 

 

Ready for change at your school?

Book a demo with our team to learn what’s possible with a Veracross SIS.