Children’s Day: Take the pledge to ensure student safety with ERP

For more than 50 years we have celebrated Children's Day in memory of a man who was a passionate advocate of quality education and improvement of the standards of life for the children and youth of our country. And yet, millions of children continue to be denied important human rights such as ‘equality in dignity’ and ‘security of person’, not to mention the right to quality education. An environment lacking in safety and security can never be conducive for learning.

How safe are our children in schools across the country? A tough question to answer, indeed!

According to 2017 statistics from the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), 53 percent of kids surveyed had faced sexual abuse in one form or the other. The fact that a significant number of these crimes happen at schools is a major cause for concern.

Security lapses in educational institutions across the country have resulted in countless incidents of assault, rape, and murder of students in well-known schools across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Ghaziabad, and Chandigarh, among other cities, in the last couple of years.

Additionally, with the advancements in technology, the threats to a child’s safety and security are no longer just physical but also come in the form of data leakages, cyberbullying, cyber manipulation, and so on. Besides, schools also face security threats in the form of hackers hampering their day-to-day dealings.

Digital systems for all-round safety

Ensuring the safety of thousands of children every day is not an easy task, and mere CCTV surveillance will not suffice to fulfill this. It is here that software such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) becomes crucial in managing the safety and security of students by keeping track of a student’s location, managing visitors to a school, and combating hackers.

Tracking student transport: The school transport system can be made safer by enabling real-time tracking of transport vehicles. The ERP mobile application allows parents as well as schools to keep track of school buses throughout their journey. Parents can receive constant communication regarding delays due to traffic or other factors. The system also allows parents to check the speed of the bus, its current location, etc. It ensures that only parents or persons authorised by them can drop off or pick up the children. All these measures provide immense comfort and relief to parents who place their children’s safety in the hands of unknown people on a daily basis.

RFID / biometric-enabled attendance management system: Going a step further, ERP provides information about a child’s whereabouts in the school with the help of radio-frequency identification or biometric access. It also keeps track of students checking in and out of the school and in specific locations such as labs, the cafeteria, and library. Gone are the days when schools had to collect data from hand-written registers. ERP can help school authorities pull up real-time data of a student’s whereabouts in the school at any given point in time.

Tight visitor management system: The rising number of cases reported of impostors picking up children from school and drug dealers preying on unsuspecting students makes it necessary to have an uncompromising visitor management system. The ERP will first collect the photo-biometric details of visitors to ensure that their visit is authorised and verified, thus preventing trespassers. The system maintains a detailed record of the amount of time the child spends with the visitor, the purpose of the visit, etc.

Data security and safe networks: Leakage of confidential data from schools such as addresses, bank details, etc., constitutes a serious security breach that can have grave repercussions for all the stakeholders and negatively impact the reputation of the institution. Using an ERP software ensures that all the details are migrated to a cloud, which automatically guarantees that data is encrypted and the access to it limited. Also, with ERP, a chain of schools can be monitored using the same platform without going through the hassle of creating different IDs, thereby also creating a safe network.

The modern-day lifestyles with larger numbers of working parents and nuclear families make it difficult to ensure the safety of children at all times, especially when they are at school. It is the responsibility of schools to assuage the concerns of parents and take preemptive action with a holistic approach to children’s security. ERP makes this task easy by connecting all the stakeholders of a school around the clock for effective monitoring of student affairs.

(Edited by Athirupa Geetha Manichandar)

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