East Sussex County Council

Project Background

East Sussex County Council  carry out pupil feedback surveys every year from a number of schools in the area.

The council was in need of a data entry and data capture solution that would effectively collect the data from 3500 surveys. They also requested that the data was entered into a spreadsheet, categorised under four main student questions.

The surveys provided information on what students intended to do on completion of their final year of school. This enabled East Sussex Council to plan after-school support to all students who needed it.

By outsourcing the data entry project to Cleardata, East Sussex Council saved their employees valuable time in entering thousands of student information by hand and greatly increased the accuracy of the data.

The Solution

>Information security was a key requirement, as this project involved extracting personal data from young people including name, address, DOB, School and future employment/apprentice/education plans.

East Sussex Council chose Cleardata to manage their confidential documents due to the security of our employees and premises, as well as high quality processes and business certifications.

The company is Cyber Essentials Certified and is accredited to ISO9001 Quality Management, ISO27001 Information Security Management and BS EN 15713 for Secure Destruction of Confidential Material. All Cleardata employees are security checked by Disclosure Scotland to ensure the safety of confidential documents.

Cleardata collected the 3500 completed student feedback surveys from East Sussex County Council using one of the company’s tracked vehicles. The live tracking system monitors the documents as soon as they’ve been picked up to the moment they’re delivered at Cleardata’s secure scanning bureau.

Surveys were scanned using high performance Kodak scanners and individually indexed by a unique reference, providing fast search and retrieval for student forms.  

Once the documents had been digitised, Cleardata manually entered the data into a spreadsheet provided by East Sussex Council, using double blind entry data capture. This method involves two separate operatives entering the data, which is then checked for errors, ensuring high levels of accuracy throughout the project.

The completed spreadsheet containing 3500 student feedback surveys was securely returned to the Council, along with the scanned images of the original forms for their records. The paper based documents were retained for a further 4 weeks at Cleardata’s protected archive facility before seeking permission to be securely shred and issued with a certificate of destruction.

Due to the successful completion of the project, the Council sent another 2700 surveys the following year for Cleardata to perform the same services of extracting the data from new pupils in their final year of school. East Sussex Council also referred Cleardata to Slough Borough Council, who we’ve provided very similar services for.

Client Feedback

“Cleardata provided an efficient and excellent service. The process was simple to set up and they were able to provide the data in the format we wanted ready for us to use. It was also helpful having copies of the scanned forms returned to us indexed so that when required we could refer back to a form with ease.

The data was returned to us within the timescales requested and by using Cleardata it has enabled us to process the forms quicker and more efficiently. We will certainly be continuing to use Cleardata and refer other Local Authority’s their direction.”

Database Co-ordinator, East Sussex County Council