1. Bring everything into one place
How many systems and apps does it take to run your organisation? Ecommerce orders in one place, bookings in another, student info in a different database, registers in spreadsheets, finance somewhere else - with your team copying, pasting and filling in the gaps.
Every additional system creates another opportunity for duplicated work, inconsistent data and things to fall between the cracks. Aim for a single source of truth wherever possible, with information flowing seamlessly between the tools you do need. Your team should be able to find what they need quickly, without hunting through inboxes and spreadsheets.
Example: Being able to send and receive email directly from a student record system – rather than a separate Outlook or Gmail box – means fewer opportunities for distractions and - crucially - a single, accessible log of communications sent, all connected to the student or parent's record.
2. Banish unnecessary admin
Not all admin can disappear - but a surprising amount of it can. Look for tasks your team performs repeatedly: sending confirmations and joining instructions, chasing and reconciling payments, managing waiting lists, preparing registers, updating records or compiling reports. Then ask a simple question: does a person actually need to do this?
And try to avoid getting too hung up on edge cases. Many times in my career, I've fallen into the trap of not optimising the 99% of cases for the sake of the 1% that don't quite fit. If that's the case, and the potential gains are big enough, you'll find a way to make the 1% fit – whether through flexibility in the automation software, or through a small change to product or process. Design for the majority – tweak for the exceptions.
Good automation doesn't remove the human element from education; it gives people more time for it. Start with the small, repetitive tasks that happen hundreds or thousands of times a year. Saving two minutes might not sound transformational - until you're saving those two minutes 5,000 times across 12 months. That's 166 hours your team could be spending on more impactful work.
Example: If you're processing credit card payments through a PDQ machine, and reconciling each of those manually, how much is it costing you in staff time to do that? How much time could be freed up if all card and bank payments were automatically recorded and reconciled? What else could your bookkeeper or accounts team do with that time?
3. Know Your Customer (Experience)
When did you last experience your organisation as a customer? Try finding a course, making a booking, completing an enrolment and paying. Moreover, to accurately experience what the customer sees, try doing it on your phone, whilst also preparing breakfast in the morning, or watching Netflix in the evening. Count the taps, questions and ambiguities along the way. Are you asking for information twice? Is anything confusing? How long is/are the form(s) on mobile? Are the fields too fiddly? Do you have to send follow up information via email?
Great customer experiences and operational efficiency frequently go hand in hand: every unnecessary step you remove for a customer is often one less question to answer. One less data point to change. One less enquiry to handle.
Example: Clear course availability on your online booking system can have a huge influence on customer behaviour – with a knock-on impact to your team's time. If a customer can see a course is fully subscribed, with a link to add themselves to the waiting list, and a well-written automatic 'thank you' email that sends when they join the list – that's a high-quality customer experience, which also requires none of your team's time. If they just see a greyed-out "Book" button with no further explanation, they might contact your team to enquire… which requires a manual answer, finding the spreadsheet, adding a row, and so on – all time-consuming tasks that could have been avoided with better customer journey design.
4. Put your teachers in control
Teachers and tutors are closest to your students - but too often they rely on administrators for basic information and routine tasks.
Give them secure, appropriate access to the things they need: registers, class lists, student information, schedules and relevant communications. Let them record attendance or access essential information themselves, rather than sending requests back and forth to an office team.
The goal isn't to turn teachers into administrators; quite the opposite. Good systems should make the administrative parts of teaching almost invisible, while reducing the stream of small requests that collectively consume significant amounts of your central team's time.
Example: When registers are printed manually, given to a teacher, completed manually, collected by an administrator, and then transposed into a system – that requires five handovers or manual actions. Scale that up across 10 classes and that's ten pieces of paper and 50 actions. It's easy to see how something straightforward quickly becomes a time sink, especially as organisations grow. Giving tutors access to registers, allowing them to complete them via a secure login on their device, and updating the central system instantly eliminates all the routine admin – allowing administrators to focus on no shows and exceptions.
5. Recover time for your team (and ask them how they'd use it)
Efficiency isn't really about saving time. It's about deciding what to do with the time you get back. If better processes and automation could give everyone on your team a few hours back each week, ask them how they'd use them. What important work keeps getting pushed aside because the day-to-day admin takes over? Perhaps it's talking to customers, supporting teachers, improving programmes, developing partnerships or launching something new. That's when operational efficiency becomes more than cost-saving.
Remove low-value work and you create capacity for the higher-value work that helps your organisation - and the people within it - thrive.