Colleagues,
I've been looking at the information we currently collect for Trust reporting, and there are a few areas where we're asking schools for essentially the same information in slightly different formats.
The biggest examples at the moment are:
- Attendance figures
- Behaviour incidents
- Suspensions
- Assessment outcomes
- Staff absence
In some cases the information already exists in the MIS, but we're then asking schools to transfer it into a separate spreadsheet or template for Trust reporting.
I'm not suggesting we remove any of the underlying checks. The question is whether we can get to a position where schools enter information once and we extract what we need from there.
Has anyone already tackled this successfully?
Chris
We've had a similar issue with financial reporting.
The biggest improvement came when we agreed exactly what the Trust actually needed to see before looking at how each school supplied it.
We had previously been collecting considerably more detail than was being used.
I'd suggest doing that exercise first rather than starting with the technology.
For attendance and behaviour, could we look at a simple automated dashboard pulling directly from the MIS?
Even if we only started with three or four headline measures, it would remove quite a bit of monthly copying.
The challenge will probably be getting the definitions consistent between schools.
I think the definitions point is the important one.
We've had situations where two schools have both reported "persistent absence", but they've been using different calculation dates.
The dashboard would make the collection easier, but it could also make inconsistent data look much more official!
That's exactly the concern I'm trying to avoid.
I'll map the current definitions alongside the reporting requirements before we look at automation. If we can agree those first, the technical side should be much more straightforward.