As an independent, non-governmental and non-profit humanitarian organisation, Concordia Romania has spent over two decades focused on their mission of supporting the social reintegration, education and professional development of disadvantaged children, young adults and families and help them build more independent and autonomous lives for themselves.
Their Vocational School Project was born in 2010 as an alternative education programme for young adults who want to develop careers in hospitality, culinary arts, carpentry and horticulture.
To support the programme, Concordia wanted to develop a single tool that would enable a multi-disciplinary team to manage various pedagogical processes and also replace time-consuming manual processes focused on creating student profiles.
The goal was to create a holistic application that could support and streamline the contributions from the entire team which includes tutors, trainers, teachers, job coaches, social assistants, social pedagogues, case managers and psychologists, while also considering data protection, ease of use, multi-device accessibility and low development costs.
To bring this application to life, the Concordia team knew that they needed a technology partner who could not only understand their mission, but also aspire and adhere to their vision and purpose while rising to challenge of delivering on it.
Endava partnered pro bono with Concordia to help them build a feature-rich yet accessible and easy-to-use cloud-based platform: the Concordia Student Development Tool.
Built on AWS, the app helps the entire Concordia team to manage the complex pedagogical processes of a vocational school, while also supporting students on their personal and educational development journey and providing strict security and data compliance.
The solution is based on an AWS serverless implementation, keeping the running costs significantly low and allowing the further development of the app to ensure it is highly scalable, responsive, easily maintained and tailored to their evolving educational process.
The application provides a secure place for staff members to access and edit case records, student profiles and class schedules which can be exported on demand. Future planned capabilities include creating a new feature which would grant access to relevant sections to students, parents and sponsors.
Since the implementation of the tool, the Concordia team have seen a dramatic increase in information transparency, cross-functional communication and collaboration. Thanks to real-time access, each staff member can reference all the information captured by various contributors as and when they need it as opposed to only receiving updated profiles at the beginning of each year.
Better stored records and ease of access have also improved the educational process, as staff members can adjust their objectives and teaching methods, provide more accurate feedback and better handle difficult situations.
The biggest benefit of the application is that now the Concordia team spends less time on manually writing and storing records and is able to give back this time to those who matter the most: their students.