"We are passionate about Careers and Work-Related Learning! The Connect platform is a brilliant piece of tech enabling educators, students, and employers to track all aspects of work placement and career programmes. We are the only software provider with a delivery team that has facilitated hundreds of thousands of work placements and careers programmes over the past 14 years."
We help schools and colleges provide purposeful, planned, and safe work experiences and wider career opportunities. We are passionate about work-based learning and understand the enormous leap many students struggle to make from the classroom to the workplace. We appreciate how difficult it is for a busy educator to find and oversee appropriate, safe, and meaningful work experiences for large cohorts of learners. We know that GATSBY, OFSTED, qualifications, logistics, risk management and, as importantly, employer engagement make work experience programmes enormously time-consuming and logistically complex. We have blended our two passions – education and technology – to build the answer:
A web platform for schools and colleges to manage and track all aspects of work placement and careers provision which supports schools, colleges, students, and employers without removing the all-important human element. CONNECT web is an all-in-one solution that saves you time and money and creates enormous value for everyone involved.
A mobile app platform enables learners to digitally manage, track and review all work placement and careers interactions. The app allows a student to develop a stream of benefits, from building an online CV to finding a placement and developing the qualifications and skills required to turn the experience into a career. In the past year, we have supported leading educators to facilitate over 100,000 placements.
How we help
Unlike many software-based businesses, we don’t leave student’s futures to algorithms. We have a large team of passionate people to help every learner, school, college, and employer gets the best from the work placement and career opportunities available. As delivery providers, we truly understand the requirements and guidance of OFSTED, Gatsby, HSE (Health and Safety Executive) and MATRIX. This has enabled us to create, adapt, and develop the technology to meet your needs to ensure that students have access to high-quality work-related learning and career guidance to help them make informed decisions about their future.
Both Connect® software and mobile app offer a platform to support schools and colleges to evidence the implementation of the Gatsby Benchmarks and enable seamless reporting into COMPASS+.
CONNECT’s paperless system has saved us a lot of time and resources. The new CONNECT app is a great addition, enabling students to access their placements from their phones. Overall, it’s easy to engage with employers and we can simply pull off the reports and evidence needed for the Gatsby Benchmarks.
Elizabeth EnglishAssistant Principal, The Harris Federation.
CONNECT from Changing Education has give us the opportunity to focus our time on the real issues regarding placements and not be overrun with admin or paperwork. It offers us an easy to use interface with which we can record, monitor and evaluate our placements whilst offering us a reporting structure that gives us information and statistics to use for our KPIs. A great acquisition that we intend to use year on year as we grow.
Andrew SnapeNewcastle and Stafford College
The Changing Education Group have developed a fantastic piece of software called CONNECT which I use every day to manage all placement activity! I’ve been in my role nearly 2 years and CONNECT has made my day to day job so much easier from day one. I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it!
Holly DickinsonWork Placement Co-ordinator, Cheshire College South & West
Core Placement Functionality
Employer Database & Geolocation
“Enable your staff to succinctly and effectively manage your interactions with current and potential employers. Use data analysis about employer history with your teams to improve employer relationships. This also enables all team members to communicate effectively with local businesses to support all work-based learning. Management and tracking of daily staff activity will permit SLT to set key performance indicators.”
“This functionality will enable staff to effectively manage placement creation (including placement opportunities), student self-placement (including via the app).”
Placement Creation, Proposed Placements and Work-Related Activity
Are you able to add dates to students profile for planned WEX off timetable? Yes Can you input hours and days then just copy over weeks? Yes Can we end placements early or mark placements as not starting, but keep the proposed placement data? Yes
“CONNECT also offers the user tools to submit proposed placements and approve or deny digital self-placement submissions and placement opportunities applications.”
Can we manually and digitally log and track all self-placement activity? Yes
“Empower your staff to have greater control of health and safety risk management for all work placement activity. Manage and track in greater depth to enable quality assurance and compliance of all staff and employer activity.”
We provide customers with the autonomy to create and edit their own risk assessment templates. These are automatically sent out to employers once a student has been placed. CONNECT allows users to create risk assessments for individual employer categories. This ensures that the risk assessment is always relevant to that sector. Our clever system keeps staff constantly updated regarding outstanding Risk Assessment figures.
“This functionality will enable staff to effectively manage, track, and evaluate employer and student placement feedback. In addition, staff can evaluate, review and request appraisals and feedback individually or via larger cohorts of students.”
Can I manage and track employer and student feedback, and send requests whenever we want? Yes Can you contact multiple students at once? Yes Can you contact multiple Employers at once? Yes Can you task staff members to complete appraisals? Yes Can we create certificates to evidence placement activity? Yes
“This functionality will enable staff to effectively manage, track, and evaluate all aspects of work placement and work-related learning attendance.”
Can you manage and track student attendance manually? Yes Does the system have automated attendance functionality? Yes Does the system track placement hours against planned hours? Yes
The consent management functionality is the simple solution that will enable you to effectively log, manage, track and report on work placement consent from all parties (Student, Parent/Guardian, Employer, and College Staff).
Can we log universal enrolment consent? Yes Can we manage placement-specific consent? Yes Can the consent be managed digitally via email submissions? Yes Can Students, Parent/Guardians, and Employer digitally sign consent? Yes
The Connect platform is easy to navigate, easy to use and I can access all of our data. The reporting functionality allows me to clearly see if something has gone wrong which allows the team to work more efficiently.
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