About the Client

The Orpheus Centre is an independent specialist college for young disabled adults with a passion for the performing arts. Started by Sir Richard Stilgoe in 1988, the Centre helps provide students with the skills to live independently. The Centre uses performing arts led teaching to build up students own self-belief and to ensure each and every student reaches their full potential.

The Project

Since 1988, the Centre has grown and now manages the full requirements for a number of students who live on-site throughout the academic year. Although there had been, and continues to be, great investment in the facilities and teaching resources, some of the background technology resources and services were in need of consolidation and upgrade, in line with Ofsted and CQC requirements.

The Trustees and the Senior Management Team requested assistance with upgrading their core technology solutions (working in partnership with their technology providers), the development of a new student tracking and management systems to allow both academic and domiciliary care professionals to access the right information at the right time, and better overall technology services for their staff and students.

Our Approach

Strategic Discourse teams initially carried out a full discovery phase. During this phase of work, the teams designed outline solutions for each department – including ensuring that records were correctly linked between academic monitoring, domiciliary care and finance. The fundraising department also required solutions to ensure that they were able to better manage and track all campaigns. Other management solutions were required for HR and the volunteers.

The discovery phase also allowed Strategic Discourse to understand the limitations of the infrastructure and current software available at the site, along with carrying out a full skills audit of all staff. By carrying out a full horizon scanning exercise, Strategic Discourse teams were able to recommend the best-fit solutions for each area, and to ensure that the best hardware, software and infrastructure recommendations were made. The teams also worked closely with the Orpheus management team to ensure the Centre was able to employ its own technology professional (full time to provide onsite support and lead future developments) and Strategic Discourse provided additional training on the new systems to this person.

At every step, Strategic Discourse worked to provide the Centre with maximum discounts from all suppliers, getting deals in excess of their normal offerings for charities. All horizon scanning activities were done in a supplier agnostic manner to ensure that the best overall solutions were brought forward for the Centre, and the Centre remained in control of all contracts – signing directly with each service provider/supplier to ensure maximum openness.

It was important to the team that the Centre be left with a solution which they could continue to develop and manage themselves, rather than being locked into maintenance and support agreements with Strategic Discourse departments.

The Outcome

The works carried out upgraded the hardware, software and infrastructure at the Centre. This allowed all students to have unfettered access to high speed internet, and to the other tools and services chosen by their teachers to best meet their individual learning and support needs.

For the organisation, Strategic Discourse provided bespoke solutions (built on Salesforce.com) for student management and tracking, as well as other solutions for HR, finance and fundraising. The team ensured that the Salesforce.com solution was available – with different functionality – to various departments, to provide the Centre with a single overall student view.

Strategic Discourse provided full training to most users, as well as additional superuser training, and full manuals – specifically written for the Orpheus Centre – for multiple systems.

The in-house technical team were also provided with full training on how to manage and upgrade the new systems themselves, ensuring that the Centre did not have to completely rely on our support services in the future.

Strategic Discourse had to move swiftly with our implementation of technological upgrades while still remaining thorough and diligent. The Centre had recently recorded its second “Requires Improvement” Ofsted grading in a row and was facing serious repercussions if a third review found similar results. After the technology redesign was complete and pushed live at the start of 2018, Orpheus received a “Good” Ofsted rating.