Background
The Trust in Learning Academies Trust (TiLA), based in Bristol, is a very forward thinking Trust, committed to driving excellence. At the time, TiLA had recently adopted Arbor as their MIS, and was looking for a solution to enable their Schools and SLT to easily access up to date key information.
“We wanted to have live data at our fingertips at a Trust and Board level.”
The Challenge
The Trust’s data was spread across disparate systems (Arbor & Snowflake), and across 4 sites. What they wanted was to be able to immediately see key headline stats and analytics in one place in a simple and easy to understand.
There was some very specific pain points such as being unable to summarise attendance data because it wasn’t aggregated automatically. Their attendance alone had over 2 million rows of data which meant that when trying to download there were real performance issues due to the sheer volume of information; all of this to be overcome before even getting the opportunity to do any analysis!
TiLA simply didn’t have the time or the available internal resources to develop a viable solution themselves.
“Schools BI will allow us to deliver the highest possible standard of education.”
The Solution
Working closely with the Trust, we developed a series of dashboards that can be viewed individually by School or at Trust level. These can be loosely separated into the following categories:-
- Attendance
o Absences by School/Year/Type/AM & PM
o Persistent absenteeism and Serious Absenteeism
- Behaviour
o Suspensions
o Exclusions
o By School/Year/Month/Pupil/ Number of days
- Assessment & Attainment
o Per school, year, class, subject & pupil
o DFE or internal
All of the dashboards show this key information in a variety of clear simple visuals that can be additionally filtered by date and a set of Trust-defined tags.
A word from TiLA ….
Dave Spence, Director of School Improvement. “We wanted to have live data at our fingertips at a Trust and Board level. Schools BI allows us to track KPI’s accurately in order to quality assure the work in our schools on the basis of evidence. We are on a journey of continuous school improvement so, having a bespoke Trust Dashboard, designed in partnership with Schools BI, will allow us to deliver the highest possible standard of education.
Being able to compare attendance, behaviour and progress data in a visually appealing dashboard will allow those key colleagues in governance roles to have an even more detailed and accurate understanding of what the school improvement issues are in all of our settings.”
