About The School

Silkwood School has a very high focus on student engagement, with a holistic approach to child development that reaches well beyond successful test results. The school currently caters for 420 students up to Year 9 but is growing towards its licensed capacity of 750 students through to Year 12.

Silkwood School in Mt Nathan, Queensland, holds the distinction of being the launch customer for Engage in Australia, at that time the 35th country in which Double First had implemented its school focused software.

“We were looking for a school management system at EduTECH 2013,” IT Manager  Andrew Kemp explains. “The system at Silkwood was not reliable enough and its development was in a constant state of flux.

“We needed a system that is robust and scalable and could perform at least 90 per cent of our large wish list. We also wanted it to be flexible and open platform so that we could integrate easily  with other tools. Double First Engage met the criteria.”

Andrew, who has three decades of experience managing complex IT systems, states that there were several obvious advantages in choosing Engage over other systems. 

“We liked the fact that Double First had worked in education for 26 years with a loyal base of schools. We appreciated that Engage recognises learning is as important as record keeping. We were particularly enthusiastic about the various methods within Engage to measure student targets and to report on them.”

Double First has firmly committed to Australia and is already well placed to support schools in the country with a wholly-owned support office in Singapore and an experienced consultant based in New Zealand. 

Country specific requirements are in a defined development plan to ensure that Australian schools benefit from a well established international product while having local considerations addressed. “The efforts you have gone to have been fantastic, so we’re very encouraged and enthusiastic about that. Engage is also reliable – we haven’t had a system outage since we installed it,” Andrew confirms.

An early win for Silkwood has been implementing the highly customisable Daybook in Engage to provide teachers and parents with critical progress informatioon on students. “There is more power in sharing information than keeping it and your Daybook is the golden ticket,” Andrew states. “Its flexibility is good too.”