Schools generate and hold an array of data including attendance records, exam grades, medical history, SEN data and many more. Yet holding the vast amounts of data isn’t necessarily the issue, but rather how it’s used, and how we use it to find its value and therefore improve could prove to be the key to a school moving forward.
Speaking as a (former) teacher, I can objectively say that quite often there is too much data to handle. Each area of data has its value, but it’s easy to get lost amongst understanding the numbers, abbreviations and the unfortunate GUI that some Management Information Systems (MIS) have.
Running reports in your MIS can give you an overview of the information needed but being able to filter through the data can be time consuming, particularly if you’ve chosen to run the report into an Excel Spreadsheet.
However, feeding that data into PowerBi can transform it from confusing cells on a spreadsheet into a clear, concise and attractive format.
Schools that collect the data should, ideally, be using it to raise the quality of teaching and ultimately improve the student outcomes. Using the data to recognise patterns or identify solutions from problems in the data is essentially the reason for collecting this data.
In PowerBi you can create your dashboard to include different filters and options to identify these patterns. Or, even in its most basic use, you can track attendance, behaviour issues and achievements. Scheduling daily reports is also possible in your MIS so that your PowerBi dashboard can be updated daily for this important element, making it even easier to track areas.
Overview of Pupils on Roll. — Get a clear overview of the daily attendance in your school. Using filters, you can also optimise the data to show several different outputs including gender, SEN, ethnicity and pupil premium.
Overview of Attendance figures — Delve even further into the attendance area to show current percentage scores to date across year groups, pupil premium, EAL, SEN. You can also identify persistent absence.
In an age where the very models of schools and businesses are blurring, ‘numbers’ are the new ‘in’ currency. More importantly, positive numbers.
With that in mind, below is an overview of Attainment within the school, specifically Progress 8 measures at that point in time. Identifying data such as this, as early as possible, is key to creating solutions immediately rather than handling problems in the future.
Many schools are now in Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) — it’s even harder to get a joined-up picture of what’s going on. Data is in different systems in different schools. Just think how useful it could be, as a CEO of a multi-academy trust to have an overview of all the schools. Being able to drop-in, view, analyse and compare statistics on a single dashboard.
Utilising PowerBi with your MIS is could be the difference in supporting you and helping you prepare for those difficult OFSTED questions. Having very recently left the profession, anything that can make a schools productivity more efficient has to be worth exploring.
Note: Thank you to David Pott for his incredible investigation work on PowerBi which allowed me to create this post. Check him out at his website.
