Effective Management of Student Level Data Across a Family of Schools

Present government policy continues to promote the creation of larger multi-academy trusts and with this comes greater challenges

School leaders must ensure that their systems and processes are fit for purpose in promoting the best possible student outcomes whilst also being efficient and cost effective. Here Martin Cain provides some practical advice for MAT leaders to ensure that their assessment and data tracking systems are simple, workload friendly and make an effective contribution to the development of impact-driven teaching and learning strategies

• Using a single data-tracking system across all schools in a trust will support the development of a common language across all of them and a uniform approach to the key aspects of the raising standards agenda.
• For example, this can help facilitate the establishment of unified target-setting and intervention strategies where all staff and students are clear about how the targets have been determined and also how progress towards them will be tracked, regardless of school.

• Creating a centralised data system will support the trust to carry out interim checks on the projected progress of their schools throughout the academic year. This must also be flexible enough to allow individual schools a degree of autonomy over when they collect data, alongside the strategic data collection and tracking requirements of the trust.
• Individual schools have different needs that are specific to their setting and require a system that can be tailored to reflect this accordingly. For example, they may have different priorities in terms of the student groups that they track, will want to define the type of progress data to be collected and analysed and will require their own staff to determine the relevant intervention priorities which will inform their learning and teaching strategies.
• Individual schools have a responsibility to the trust and must provide data analysis that allows MAT leaders to compare strengths and areas for development across them in a timely manner and which also enables them to ask the right questions to hold each school to account; greater efficiency can be ensured when all trust schools share common features across the key elements of their quality assurance processes and in the language that they use when analyzing their student level data.

• All analyses should be made as simple and straightforward as possible so that trust leaders are able to access their school tracking systems quickly and ensure they are comparing like for like in terms of progress indicators.
• A centralised approach should allow leaders to determine priorities across the trust on an ongoing basis and ensure that resources are assigned appropriately on a school by school basis to the students identified by the data as being in most need of them; this will support the efficient and effective use of trust resources.