Babington
Overview
Babington uses Mesma to help deliver quality improvement directly to learners through highly-effective quality improvement and assurance processes.
Babington is one of the UK’s largest apprenticeship providers, delivering training programmes to more than ten thousand learners across a range of sectors and specialisms. In an ongoing commitment to technology and service improvement, the company has used the Mesma software platform as part of a strategy to further enhance critical quality assurance processes, which are managed and overseen by their team of central quality specialists.
Mesma replaces legacy manual database management and reporting, and delivers the further benefit of supporting Babington to identify and diagnose gaps in quality performance on an ongoing basis across its workforce of over 400 staff and practitioners. In turn, this is centralising the management of important functions alongside more effective monitoring and feedback on progress against improvement plans.
Fresh approaches
Amongst the core benefits of the Mesma software, Babington has found individual ownership of the quality assurance practices within the workforce has significantly improved. Users can access the system to be emersed in various aspects of quality assurance and improvement; this includes producing more effective self-assessment to identify and prioritise opportunities for improvement with a clear sight over the requirements of core stakeholders – such as Ofsted.
Dr Barbara Van der Eecken, director of quality and service standards, said:
“Using the information provided by Mesma allows us to have more impactful conversations with the Operations team around the progress of individual tasks and objectives. Everything is centralised on an easy-to-use, highly accessible platform that provides much better, easy-to-understand information for everyone.
“Equally, it links performance to operational quality. Resources can be more effectively allocated while deep dive analysis and progress reviews using the Enquire module saves us time, ensuring we are able to make both more informed decision-making.”
Sarah Richards, Babington’s quality and service standards manager (Teaching and Learning), added that products such as Develop help us to work with colleagues collaboratively to measure the quality of the provision for the learner and identify activities that will improve delivery and support growth for practitioners.
“This was challenging before we had Mesma,” she said. “The capacity to process the information on a daily basis is a sector wide issue. However, using Mesma data in our analytics helps us to identify trends quickly so that we can respond through targeted support and allocation of resources. This goes a long way to raising standards and facilitating a cutting-edge learner experience which leads to better outcomes.”
“Babington operates across England and Scotland, so coordinating access to important management information and oversight for both countries through Mesma is a significant improvement over the various systems we had in place before.” Sarah Richards said.
Next generation success
As a forward-thinking business, Babington has played its part in the development of the next generation of Mesma in 2022. Their feedback has helped shaped features including the relaunch of the Develop product and the introduction of the quality cycle calendar and the KPI tool, all of which are now helping other providers hit their own quality targets.
“Undoubtedly, we will continue to see a steadily growing requirement for ever more rapid and effective reporting and feedback in an ever-shifting learning landscape, and technology has a seminal role to play in helping us do this,” said Dr Barbara Van der Eecken. “It’s why we are investing time to help shape online tools like Mesma to further improve quality company wide, showcase good practice, identify trends and direct resources where they are most needed.”
Louise Doyle, CEO at Mesma, added:
‘It’s a privilege to work with the team at Babington to support them to deliver their ambitions. We consider it a true partnership, learning from their experience of using the software which helps us to define our priorities for improvement.”
