Audio lesson · 8 minutes
Getting it right at the front door
Most funding-critical data is captured at enrolment. Front-door quality is the cheapest data quality there is, and the only kind that scales.
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Chapters
- What enrolment decides
- Five controls worth having
Transcript
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Introduction
Getting it right at the front door. Most funding-critical data is captured at enrolment. Front-door quality is the cheapest data quality there is, and the only kind that scales.
What enrolment decides
An error made here propagates through the entire year and is corrected many times over. An error prevented here costs a few seconds. The highest-value front-door controls are a mandatory duplicate search, an evidenced home address, and eligibility evidence captured rather than merely inspected.
Five controls worth having
Each of these corresponds to a diagnostic that appears repeatedly in this Academy. They are not theoretical controls: they are the direct inverse of the most common problems colleges report.
Why front-door quality is hard, and what helps
The controls that survive a busy enrolment week are the ones built into the system rather than into a briefing. A mandatory duplicate search that cannot be skipped works. A reminder in a training session does not survive September. The second principle is to make the right thing the easy thing. Capturing evidence into a store at the point of checking should take less effort than handing a document back, not more. The third is to measure the exception rather than the rule. A report of enrolments completed without evidence, by route and by day, finds the pressure point. A compliance percentage tells you nothing about where to intervene. Finally, close the loop back to the people doing the enrolling. Staff who see that a defaulted postcode sent a learner to the wrong funder do not default postcodes again.
Read it instead
Getting it right at the front doorThe written module carries the same content at three depths, with the worked examples, the pitfalls and the sources.
Sources
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