CHQ Case Study - Cokethorpe-School

Cokethorpe School, Oxfordshire, UK

“We quite simply would not be able to manage the scale and complexity of our co-curricular programme without CHQ”

Gareth Sheer, Director of Co-Curricular at Cokethorpe School, details how they are using CHQ to manage their expanding co-curricular programmes at this outstanding independent school in Oxfordshire.

Founded in 1957, Cokethorpe School has about 660 pupils, ranging in age from four to eighteen, with the Junior School, Senior School and Sixth Form all on the same site. The school aims to deliver a liberal education in a vibrant, kind and academically challenging environment that will extend the potential of every pupil. The importance of co-curricular activities in delivering an ‘exciting, exacting, enriching and ennobling’ education is central to the school ethos.

CHQ has enabled us to establish an outstanding co-curricular programme and significantly increase the number and breadth of activities open to pupils. We quite simply would not be able to manage the scale and complexity of the operation without CHQ
Gareth Sheer,
Director of Co-Curricular at Cokethorpe School

CHQ Case Study - Cokethorpe School
Cokethorpe School is using CHQ extra-curricular software

Traditionally activities had taken place once a week on Fridays and these were managed using a rather cumbersome combination of paper forms and spreadsheets. At the time, activity sign-up for the new school year spread across a 3-month period - launching pre-summer, open for choices all summer and only closing after all outstanding selections had been chased up at the beginning of the new term. However, in 2016, the school leadership team made the decision to rewrite the school timetable and radically upgrade the co-curricular activities programme. From the beginning of the 2016/17 academic year, activities were to take place every day, with an extended 90-minute lunch hour split into two 45 minute extra-curricular sessions. Other co-curricular slots were also built into the academic timetable across the week.

The new co-curricular management team responsible for introducing the new schedule very quickly realised that to run the new programme effectively required a new management system. CHQ was introduced in September 2016 and now manages activity selections for 520 students. Every term, the school produces a co-curricular options booklet from which pupils can select their choices, according to certain criteria: for example, everyone must participate in at least one ‘academically’ worthy activity and, beyond that, options extend across a broad range of musical, sport and hobby-based options. CHQ’s rules functionality has proved invaluable in guiding pupils to select a balanced range of activities, including compulsory ‘worthy’ options, and then timetabling the choices across the designated co-curricular time slots across the week.
Pupils can re-select their choices each term and the number of activity options available has increased from 50 to over 200 each week. The sign-up process which used to last all summer has been transformed and this term, over 80% of pupils had completed their activity sign-up in CHQ within the first 24 hours.

Cokethorpe School uses CHQ in conjunction with WCBS Pass and Firefly.

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