Hughes Hall Modernise Admissions Processes with Valto

The client

Hughes Hall is one of the 31 colleges of the University of Cambridge, managing the full student lifecycle from application to senior membership. Each year, the college processes 700-1200 applications. Historically, the admissions process relied heavily on manual workflows, fragmented systems, and spreadsheets – leading to bottlenecks, duplicated effort, and compliance risk.

Many higher education institutions will recognise Hughes Hall’s pre-transformation challenges:

• Manual, labour-intensive processing: Repetitive Excel-based workflows slowed applicant processing and increased the risk of human error.
• Fragmented student data: CAMSIS, the University’s central student information system, was difficult to work with directly, creating visibility gaps and a reliance on staff expertise.
• Aging portal and workflows: The legacy admissions portal required manual document handling, offered limited automation, and became a single point of operational failure.
• Compliance and governance risks: Email attachments and local spreadsheets increased GDPR concerns and data-handling vulnerabilities.
• Significant cyber-risk exposure: The outdated system posed a real security threat.

As Hughes Hall put it: “Our legacy system gets compromised and that is game over.”

The Valto Student Admission Platform

The Valto Student Admission Platform, coined ‘Athena’ by the college, is a bespoke Microsoft Cloud-powered platform that delivers a modern, secure, and centralised system for managing admissions and the full student lifecycle. The platform enables:

• Accurate and authoritative data through seamless CAMSIS integration, ensuring University records flow directly into the college environment.
• Faster, more efficient application processing by replacing spreadsheets with automated, guided workflows for undergraduate and postgraduate admissions.
• Comprehensive contact management via a unified database covering students, staff, fellows, and senior members in a single governed directory.
• Secure committee and paper access with intelligent group assignments, controlled through SharePoint and Entra ID.
• Streamlined digital workflows using Dataverse, Model-Driven Apps, Power Automate, and Business Process Flows to guide every admissions step.

These outcomes result in a future-proof, cloud-managed platform that improves accuracy, speeds application handling, strengthens compliance, and supports broader college-wide digital transformation.

The Valto Student Admissions Platform is delivering clear benefits:

• Faster application processing with automated triggers and workflows.
• Reduced duplication and elimination of manual steps.
• Centralised, secure documentation through SharePoint.
• Enhanced GDPR compliance and reduced data handling risk.
• Improved cyber security.

Hughes Hall leadership emphasises the solution’s long-term strategic value: “The Microsoft cloud powered platform will allow us to take the solution a step further by integrating Power BI to pull data and create custom reports and KPI dashboards.”