IT

A leadership challenge

A merger was bound by an MIS that accommodated the strengths of the two original schools, writes Eric Medway

Independent schools have many advantages. One of the greatest is that we can often choose some of the most talented teachers in the country. We have found that one of the best ways to ensure our pupils achieve their full potential is to give these excellent teachers the time they need to concentrate on doing their jobs effectively.

This sounds simple but every school has processes or procedures that mean teachers often get tied up doing paperwork or other planning at school. At The Grammar School at Leeds, we aim to reduce this administration to the minimum so that we can leave teachers to get on with what they do best: supporting pupils’ learning. One of the greatest allies we have to help us achieve this is our management information system (MIS).

New start
We started this academic year with more than 2,300 pupils, having merged a girls’ and a boys’ school together. As a result we have created a school which must be one of the largest private educational establishments in the UK, bringing in around £1.8 million in fees each month.

In merging the schools, we could make a fresh start in the way we managed school processes. We wanted our MIS to administer as many of the complex organisational tasks we perform at the school as possible, helping free up time for teachers and leadership staff. We decided to use SIMS from Capita Children’s Services as it would handle many of the functions we were seeking to streamline, from managing attendance and report-writing to keeping track of behaviour in the school.

One of the most difficult practical challenges of merging the two schools has been bringing together two timetables. Although the school is now mixed gender, we made the decision to teach most lessons (59 out of 60) as single sex. However, personal and social education remains co-educational as teachers felt there was value to be added from having mixed pupil groups. Each subject department decides how they would like teaching groups set; some departments like mixed-ability groups, others like to have pupils of similar abilities working alongside one another. All these different criteria would result in sleepless nights for even the most skilled of timetablers, so we decided to put the technology to the test. We fed our complex structural requirements into the timetabling module and were pleased to find it was able to handle these easily. What we thought was going to be a considerable hurdle in our first full academic year as a mixed school was overcome relatively painlessly.

Good behaviour
The technology has been useful in backing up our behaviour policy too. Although we do not have many behavioural issues within the school, like any school of our size there are occasionally incidents that need to be resolved. By recording all behavioural incidents in the MIS we can provide the head of year with a weekly report so that they can deal with any pupils with the full facts at their disposal. The key benefit of this is the consistency of approach. This method ensures that we are not missing anyone we should be dealing with – no student manages to slip under the radar – which sends out a positive message on behaviour at the school.

Meetings with parents are more fruitful as you have a historical account of a pupil’s behaviour instantly accessible to you. This means that a discussion can start on the basis of facts and move swiftly towards a resolution, rather than spending time discussing what actually happened and who was involved.

Time-saver
We have also found that technology saves time for teachers in report-writing. There is some debate among schools whether parents prefer handwritten or typed reports. With handwritten reports, teachers would have to set huge chunks of time aside for report-writing and, by using the MIS, we can avoid this.

When preparing a pupil report, the child’s name is pulled directly from the system and teachers can include a range of other details that are stored on the MIS, such as attendance information or assessment results. The teacher can then type in their comments and the system formats the data to our standard report.

Teachers now have more time to concentrate on the content of the report. Far from having problems with parents, we found they are happy to receive a report about their child that was understandable and meaningful. It is helping us ensure that our reports get to the heart of a pupil’s performance and provide advice on how the student’s learning can develop.

In addition, we have begun to use lesson-by-lesson electronic registration with our sixth formers as it helps us to identify patterns of absence. If any problems emerge, the software gives us a report that is useful for discussing the issue with students or parents and the possible implications non-attendance may have on exam performance.

Constant flow
We plan to use the software to keep parents up-to-date online by publishing attendance and assessment information from the MIS. This should help keep up a continual flow of information from the school to the parent and help teachers have more meaningful discussions about progress when they meet families.

We have been lucky with the merger as it has enabled us to rethink our policies afresh. It has allowed us to put technology at the core of many school processes to ensure our teachers and leadership team have the time they need to get the most out of our pupils.

Eric Medway is deputy head (systems), at The Grammar School at Leeds.

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