Automating PSSSP: Supporting Indigenous Students Through Smarter Education Administration
The Post-Secondary Student Support Program is a lifeline for Indigenous learners, but the administrative burden on Education Coordinators is enormous. Here's how automation can help communities support more students with less paperwork.
The Post-Secondary Student Support Program (PSSSP) and the University and College Entrance Preparation Program (UCEPP) are among the most impactful, and most administratively demanding, programs a First Nation education department manages.
Education Coordinators manage limited funding pools against complex prioritization matrices. They categorize applicants into strict priority tiers, verify transcripts, confirm registration, process monthly living allowances, and report back to funders. All while actually trying to support the students.
A delayed living allowance or late tuition payment can cause real harm. For a student who has moved hundreds of kilometers from home, a missed payment isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a crisis.
Where the Burden Lives
A typical PSSSP cycle has several pressure points:
Application intake: Hundreds of packages arrive via email, portals, and physical mail. Each contains proof of enrollment, transcripts, band membership verification, and more.
Eligibility and priority ranking: Every application must be assessed against the community’s local operating guidelines and priority selection criteria. This ranking directly determines who receives funding.
Document verification: Transcripts must be official. Registration must be confirmed. Missing documents mean multiple rounds of follow-up with students who may have inconsistent access to technology.
Funding allocation and tracking: Calculate tuition, travel, and living allowances for each approved student, track payments throughout the year, and manage changes or withdrawals.
Funder reporting: At year-end, everything must be compiled into detailed reports reconciling payments, tracking outcomes, and demonstrating program delivery.
Most band offices handle all of this manually. The Education Coordinator is simultaneously an intake clerk, financial analyst, student advisor, and compliance officer.
How Automation Helps
Automation doesn’t replace the coordinator’s judgment. It handles repetitive tasks so the coordinator can focus on advising students, building institutional relationships, and advocating for funding.
Automated application intake: Automation agents ingest documents and use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract applicant data. No more manual data entry from email attachments into tracking spreadsheets.
Priority ranking assistance: Extracted data is cross-referenced against community priority criteria to generate a preliminary ranking list. The coordinator reviews, adjusts, and approves. The human decides; the automation does the data work.
Automated document follow-up: When an application is missing a document, the system automatically notifies the student with a clear list of what’s needed. This alone can reduce weeks of email triage.
Payment tracking: Living allowance schedules, tuition payments, and travel reimbursements are tracked automatically. Payment requests are generated on schedule, and discrepancies are flagged for review.
Year-end reporting: Data collected throughout the year feeds directly into funder reporting templates. The coordinator reviews a draft that’s been building all year instead of scrambling to compile it from scratch.
Respecting Community Criteria
Every community has its own local operating guidelines, priority criteria, and processes. Automation must adapt to the community, never the other way around.
We start by learning exactly how your PSSSP operates. What are the priority tiers? What documents are required? How are appeals handled? The automation follows those exact rules. If the community changes its criteria, the automation is updated to match.
Data Protection for Student Information
Student applications contain deeply personal information: financial circumstances, family details, academic records, and band membership data. Our automations ensure that:
- Student data is stored exclusively within Canada
- Access is restricted to authorized education department staff
- No student information is fed into external AI models
- Full audit trails record every action taken on student records
- The community retains complete ownership and control of all data
Getting Started
If your education department is managing PSSSP with spreadsheets, email chains, and late nights during application season, we should talk. We start by listening to your education team, understanding your community’s criteria, and building automation that follows your rules exactly.
