From Whiteboards to Insight: How UWE Bristol Transformed Student Casework with Advocate

When Ian Stratton, Head of Student Casework and Insight at UWE Bristol, took on his role in 2022, the team was managing cases the way many institutions still do — sticky notes on whiteboards, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook threads, and SharePoint lists cobbled together into something that barely resembled a system. Getting a clear picture of what was happening with students was difficult, visibility was limited, and growing case volumes were putting the team under pressure.

"We were fragmented," Ian explained during Symplicity's UK Advocate & Access User Group Meeting. "We had no confidence in our ability to manage and have oversight of our student population."

UWE had already implemented Advocate in 2022 for student services teams, bringing wellbeing, disability services, community liaison, and organised services onto the platform. By late 2023, the institution began working toward migrating its core casework function — complaints, academic appeals, fitness to study, conduct, and professional suitability — into Advocate's newer Flex environment. Between January and the end of March 2025, the team completed the full build and migration, going live on 1 April 2025.

The transition wasn't without its challenges. Moving from a fragmented, ad hoc setup to a functionally complete system was a culture shift for a team accustomed to working with familiar, if inadequate, tools. Ian took a deliberate approach: rather than waiting for perfection, the team adopted a "make it first, make it good later" philosophy — getting into the system, experimenting, and iterating based on real use.

"The system doesn't make cases less complex or complaints less time-consuming," Ian noted. "What it does is make managing the actual case itself so much easier."

Results speak for themselves

Where caseworkers once juggled disconnected tools, they now have a single, configurable system that brings all case evidence, communications, workflow stages, and documentation together in one place. Custom forms handle everything from student intake and risk assessments to compensation frameworks and satisfaction surveys. Risk monitoring — critical given UWE's involvement in safeguarding — runs through the entire case management process, with automated flags supporting timely intervention.

The data capabilities have been a particular game-changer. The team can now report consistently on case volumes, characteristics, and resolution times, giving institutional leadership genuine confidence in how student casework is being managed. Patterns that were once invisible are now actionable: the team identified a reliable spike in conduct cases in the two weeks following Halloween and can now proactively engage students with wellbeing messaging ahead of that period.

"I can tell the Vice Chancellor how many cases we have at any given time, the characteristics of those cases, and how they're being managed. That consistency of reporting has improved confidence — in the team and in the university."

In the future

Looking ahead, UWE plans to bring academic integrity processes into the system and is exploring how case data can be connected to student retention and continuation rates, with a view to identifying whether casework processes are inadvertently creating barriers for particular student groups.

For other institutions considering the switch, Ian's advice is clear: start with the outcomes you want, be open to letting the system shape how you work, and don't wait until everything is perfect to get started.