The challenge: Time, accuracy, and confidentiality in pastoral records

Teachers can face a significant challenge when it comes to managing and documenting student behaviour, classroom engagement, and relationships. With educators often writing down ‘rough notes’ about incidents, the core issues identified are often time, accuracy, and confidentiality. Transforming these raw observations into formal, appropriate, and confidential statements for pastoral records can be time-consuming, prone to inaccuracies if rushed, and requires careful handling to maintain student privacy and avoid emotional language.

The cechat solution: Automated pastoral record generation

To address these pain points, Jason Lane, Director of e-Learning at Villanova College, Brisbane has developed a specialised cechat agent, known as the Pastoral Note Moderator. This agent is designed to assist teachers in documenting and managing student behaviour, classroom engagement, and relationships in a factual and unbiased manner, ensuring confidentiality.

The process with cechat has streamlined:

• Input of raw notes: A teacher can input ‘rough notes’ detailing an incident involving student behaviour or interactions. For example, a note might describe a physical altercation between students.

• AI transformation: The cechat agent guides the teacher through a process to refine these notes. It instructs the user to:

• Remove full names and replace them with initials for privacy.

• Detail specific behaviours, actions, and consequences factually, avoiding emotional language or bias.

• Generation of formal statement: The agent then transforms these details into a grammatically correct, factual, and confidential statement. This output provides a professional and objective record of the incident, ready for use in pastoral care systems. For instance, a rough note about a fight involving "John Smith" and "Tim Shaw" is converted into a detailed account using only initials, focusing on observable behaviours and consequences.

Impact and benefits

The implementation of cechat for pastoral records management delivers several key advantages:

• Improved accuracy and professionalism: cechat can help ensure that notes are grammatically correct and factual. This enhances the quality and reliability of pastoral records, providing clear and objective documentation.

• Enhanced confidentiality: By guiding teachers to replace full names with initials and remove emotional language, the AI agent supports the creation of confidential statements that protect student privacy.

• Time efficiency: Automating the process of converting rough notes into formal statements has the potential to save teachers valuable time that would otherwise be spent meticulously drafting and revising records.

• Consistency and compliance: The agent's structured approach helps ensure consistency in how incidents are documented across different teachers and situations, aiding compliance with school guidelines.

By providing this intelligent solution, cechat directly addresses critical administrative pain points, allowing teachers to manage student wellbeing and behaviour records more effectively and efficiently.