We know how important first impressions are.
Over 600,000 teachers have now returned to schools in the UK. With new classrooms to configure, curriculums to learn and students to meet, setting yourself up for early success is key.
This is where your School MIS can help.
Our Education Consultants share their five top tips to help you maximise the first few weeks, and we’ve paired these with some exciting Bromcom MIS features that can help.
Reflection
Reflection is crucial from a personal and professional standpoint:
Personal
Good practitioners analyse and challenge their teaching at the end of every academic year. Assessing what went well, what could be improved, and the introduction of industry developments are all part of this process.
These reflections can be put into practice with your new class, setting the tone for an improved teaching year in 2022/23.
Professional
Ofsted has recently modified its framework to shift focus from results-based grading. Nonetheless, they are still an integral component of yours and your student’s success.
One of the best ways to reflect is to examine last year’s statistics. Summative, formative, end-of-year, and statutory examinations give a clear sign of where learning has taken place and where gaps may have emerged.
With this data at your fingertips, you can decide how to broach challenging content from start to finish.
How a School MIS can help
Bromcom’s Benchmarking Dashboard measures your successes against internal, regional, and national averages. Toggle different year groups, classes or individuals and see how they measure against their peers. There’s no need for guesswork, we’ve broken it down for you.
Identify strengths and target weaknesses with planned intervention. Ensure the best possible chance at mastery for all your students.
Seating Plans
Creating effective seating plans at the beginning of the year is important for several reasons.
Firstly, it establishes control. There is an inherent expectation that your students are there to learn and not sit and chat with their friends.
Secondly, it provides children with the best opportunity to learn. Whether it’s Looked after Children, Pupil Premium, or EAL students, each individual should be seated somewhere that works for them.
Finally, it provides stability. Children appreciate routine and a seating plan offers exactly this. Enter the classroom, sit in your assigned seat, and prepare to learn.
Creating seating plans is not an easy skill. There is always a balance to be struck and this is often hard to come by. Fortunately, Bromcom has a solution.
How a School MIS can help
With Bromcom’s Seating Plan functionality, you can create a flexible, digital seating arrangement for each of your classes. These can be configured for any room.
Our seating plans present key student information without the need to drill down into each individual. All the necessary information is at your disposal to seat your students in a manner which will promote learning from front to back.
It’s downloadable in just a couple of clicks too. Perfect for evidencing your arrangements during learning walks.
Parental Engagement
Opening a channel between home and school at the beginning of the academic year; a surefire way to motivate students from the outset.
The Education Consultants recommend contact within the first couple of weeks of September. This introduction is a great way to outline expectations, but also to encourage questions or understand potential blockers.
How a School MIS can help
Bromcom’s MyChildAtSchool MCAS application allows free, automated, and tailored contact with home.
Though the first phone call is best coming from the teacher, parent information is easily located in each child’s profile.
Push notifications on attendance and assessment can be sent directly to the parent’s mobile device. With an MCAS behaviour dashboard to boot, there is total visibility for all parties.
Reporting Groups
Creating reporting groups at the beginning of the first term offers the chance to assess understanding and progress at different points in the year.
Conduct ‘summative snapshots’ and see how these small cohorts are getting on in comparison with their peers.
These groups could be SEN students, high achievers or even just a random collection of individuals. Examining their results throughout the year gives you a targeted view of aptitude, as opposed to a whole class overview.
Specific interventions can subsequently be arranged to ensure all learning gaps are bridged.
How a School MIS can help
Bromcom’s MIS allows you to create bespoke groups and measure results against current or historic data.
Build the group of your choice or simply filter for a certain pupil demographic with one click.
In minutes, discover how children are learning in your classroom and triage knowledge gaps before they are compounded.
Planning interventions
It’s not just teachers resuming after the summer break.
LSAs, HLTAs and other support staff will be returning to support children’s learning.
Ensuring effective use of support staff at the beginning of the academic year is essential. By building relationships and developing trust, students can work effectively from the off. Having an HLTA wandering the class with no real direction is not a productive use of anyone’s time.
How a School MIS can help
With Bromcom’s timetabling abilities, you can see where all of your additional classroom resource is being used.
Create a comprehensive schedule for your support staff and ensure as many children as possible are being helped.
If you’re part of a MAT, you can even pool resources with our Vision product. So, if one school across your Trust is lacking provision, deploy staff from a nearby academy to support their vulnerable students.
Good luck for the 2022/23 academic year, we wish you and your students every success!
If you feel that your MIS is no longer fit for purpose or is preventing you from hitting the ground running, why not get in touch with our team today?
We’ll be happy to show you how our MIS can support your progress in the months and years ahead.
