Only constant progress in an effort to stay relevant and ahead of time can lead to success. In primary and secondary education, progress is known as school improvement.
We’ve all heard the phrase come up again and again as part of the UK government’s agenda to set out the right conditions for raising levels of student learning and achievement.
In line with the government, school leaders and teachers want to deliver a better approach to education, more effective pedagogical methods and ultimately attain better results.
As a scope, this is a truly inspiring one, but inspiration alone cannot guarantee achievement, and school leaders know this.
So, what does school improvement require?
School improvement requires a pre-set and detailed strategy or plan.
A strategy will define targets and break down the broader concept of school improvement into progressive and attainable steps. It will align with principles and standards set out by the Office for Standards in Education, Children Services and Skills (Ofsted) so that each step can be planned and taken towards meeting a given goal.
What are the standards school improvement is measured against?
The standards each school should aim to achieve to meet based on the Ofsted Education Inspection Framework (EIF) are the following:
- Quality of Education
- Behaviour and Attitudes
- Personal Development
- Leadership and Management
School improvement plan
Each of these goals can be further broken down into more manageable and defined milestones that can be achieved through actionable steps:
1. Improve quality of education:
- Intent (Curriculum Coverage) – can be achieved by setting out the entire curriculum across all subjects, planning lessons accordingly, and ensuring relevant content is available for teachers.
- Definition of approach and implementation of management system – each school decides on a preferred method of approach, as the most appropriate to support teaching and learning within its setting. Technology, in the form of a management system or MIS, is then chosen to support the approach and implemented.
- Impact – the steps taken are measured against the progress towards the initial goal: improvement of quality.
2. Improve behaviour and attitudes:
- Attitudes to Learning – in order to monitor and improve attitudes to learning, an ongoing dialogue must be established and maintained with students, parents and the wider community.
- Attendance – a track and record of attendance must be kept to identify trends, lateness or persistence in absence.
3. Improve personal development
- Staff Development and Health & Wellbeing – training can be planned to develop staff’s skills and abilities; wraparound care, clubs and trips can be organised to advance children’s wellbeing.
4. School Improvement Leadership & Management
- Vision & Ethos – a clear and consistent vision across all schools can be achieved by diminishing the difference in assessment and practice.
How Bromcom supports School Improvement
As school data is woven into the vast majority of the aforementioned areas, Bromcom is designed to help schools manage this workflow and support School Improvement.
How does Bromcom do this?
The platform offers intuitive tools for analysis, tracking and communication. Using these, strategy and vision can be defined at top level by School Leaders, MATs and LAs and each individual can map and track the steps taken towards meeting pre-set benchmarks.
Here’s how Bromcom supports each step:
- Curriculum coverage: the platform offers intuitive and easy-to-use dashboards for planning lessons by accessing notes and assessments previously entered.
- Impact: integrated assessment analysis tools clearly demonstrate teaching impact through attainment and progress. They also identify challenging students or groups with ease and compare performance both within the school, across a MAT, against national benchmarks or similar schools through the data-sharing agreement.
- Behaviour: the MIS includes a range of behaviour management and analysis tools. The Behaviour Dashboard can be used to identify emerging patterns and trends so that teachers have the opportunity to make timely interventions.Clear and open communication is facilitated through the Student and Parent Portal, enabling the collaboration between school and home, and giving parents the chance to help improve their children’s behaviour.
- Personal development – Health and Wellbeing: Bromcom features a full health profile for every student, ensuring staff are aware of the different events that could disrupt the child from reaching their full potential.Safeguarding is fully integrated into the MIS, creating a single point of reference for pupil health, incident reports and associated data points that could help identify welfare issues. Staff can log concerns at the click of a button, minimising the admin burden and ensuring no incident, however minor it may seem, is left unnoticed.For Staff Development, Bromcom includes a full CPD module to allow school leaders to track staff progress, log training and demonstrate development over time.
- Leadership & Management: The MIS provides controlled access to governors for up-to-date school performance statistics, allowing them to assess impact and effectively govern.
School leaders can use our wide range of analytics and data points to help evidence the quality education the school provides.
For instance, Bromcom Vision-X is a tool tailored for school leaders in MATs and Local Authorities who need a more comprehensive view of insights and processes, as they are responsible for multiple schools.
Scott Biggs, Senior Leader and MIS Consultant at Protean, has said:
“The integration of Power Bi to the Bromcom MIS has been a game changer in recent years. This has allowed the schools to analyse their data thoroughly as well as creating visual charts and infographics that allow staff to be able to visualise the data and the trends, bringing it to life in a way that can help shape real impact. This level of analysis has changed the way that assessment should work within an MIS and the trust system Vision.”
The cloud-based solution is able to gather data from other systems implemented within each school, enabling central teams to identify successes and failures, providing proactive measures based on a more in-depth understanding of all their schools’ data.
At Bromcom, we understand that demands for school improvement are constantly changing; therefore, we are committed to always innovating our solution to meet any new challenge and create new opportunities. All our products have been developed on the solid base of an ongoing collaboration with schools that we’ve built and maintained over the last thirty years, to find out more why not get in touch?
