Case Studies
We love hearing how Pupil Asset is helping schools across the world.
And because Pupil Asset is so customisable and flexible, everyone has a different story to tell.
Here are a few of our favourites.
Angela Jermy – Hethersett Woodside Infant and Nursery School
“All the information I need is at my fingertips”
Angela Jermy is in no doubt that Pupil Asset has played a big part in helping her school secure its Outstanding Ofsted status.
Angela, head teacher of Hethersett Woodside Infant and Nursery School, Norfolk, has been using Tracker from the outset, and then also switched to MIS from Capita SIMS. She says the system both helped track performance, but crucially allowed the leadership team and staff to make teaching tweaks where necessary to make sure the children are at the levels they need to be.
“We use the MIS system, and I find it amazing,” she says. “We prefer to be proactive rather than reactive, I pull a report together for the staff to analyse which forms our progress monitoring.”
The ability to do that helped the school successfully collate answers to specific questions raised by Ofsted during the inspection, she says.
“Where the system really helped with that was that you could tell what the impact was. It means that you can adjust things very quickly,” says Angela. “You can look at where the children are today compared to the same point last year, and analyse what’s happening to our school and where do we need to put in extra resources in order for that to happen.”
She loves the fact that information is readily available, while the new School On A Page feature is “perfect for governor’s meetings” with its ability to give an easily digestible snapshot of how the school is doing.
“I can call up all the details and have all of the information at my fingertips,” she says. “If I am waiting for a safeguarding call to come through, I can pull all of that data and details without leaving my desk, whereas before I had to go through to the office. If I have got concerns about a child at home.
“You have got immediate access to it. In this job you need that. That has made a huge difference.”
Stuart Renshaw – CEO of Celtic Cross Education in Cornwall
“What Pupil Asset is very good at is that they are very adaptable and allow you to set a bespoke system, which we have turned into a points system.”
I wanted to be able to see what’s happening across all schools, and the whole system is very much geared to enabling you to do that.
What Pupil Asset enables us to do from a strategic point of view is gather all of the information about all of the schools at the click of a button.
We can drill down to a fine level to look at any cohort and look at things such as attendance, attainment and progress, and it also enables you to make comparisons between schools.
Giving you a whole MAT overview
The ability to have a MAT overview is a really useful thing for us. When you are looking at the holistic view of a school in terms of what we are doing and what we have achieved against Ofsted criteria. What the dashboard allows me to easily make comparisons across all of the schools.
Finding and formulating the data you need
There’s the ability with Pupil Asset to formulate the data into the formats you need, so that we can see if there are any strategic weaknesses in our schools we can work on and where extra support is needed for the children.
The MIS is very functional and accessible and does all that we want it to without it being too flashy.
What Pupil Asset is very good at is that they are very adaptable and allow you to set a bespoke system from their mainframe options, which we have turned into a points system.
The adaptability is there so that you can use the system for the best outcome for your Trust, and staff can identify any support and progress of the children. You can build it around them and what they are learning and identify the children who are not progressing as far you want them to.
Simon Morley – Academies Improvement Director, Diocese of Norwich Education and Academies Trust
“With Pupil Asset, our headteachers can just push a button and get the analysis they need. It helps them to be prepared for scrutiny very quickly.”
We have 30 academies ranging from primaries with between 31 and 431 pupils and a secondary with 636 pupils. Working with Pupil Asset allows us to customise the system. They are very adaptable and very customer-focused. That was one of the reasons we joined them in the first place. Everything is responded to very quickly.
How ‘School On a Page’ helps us
We identified a need to present certain information to board level in a way that could be collated at a push of a button.
We now use the ‘School On A Page’ to call in data every half term. It helps our headteachers because they no longer have to manually generate that report themselves. Now they can just push the button and get that analysis. It helps them to be prepared for scrutiny very quickly.
Helping to improve outcomes
We have a system of area-based Academic Group Executive Principals who each have oversight of the schools in those areas. They can look at the clusters of schools and also look at the aggregated data.
What we can do is go in and look at any schools’ data as officers of the Trust. and we can look at Clusters of schools where they are federated.
We have also got access to the complete group of 30 schools and we can collect the data and compare individual with federated schools.
All of that data is produced through a single report and we use that to report back to the Trustees. It gives us the framework for reporting and holding people to account and allows us to both challenge and support them.
It means we can do that at a high level while all of the Executive Principals can also work within schools with the staff.
Sharing know-how among our staff
We now have an administrators’ network with the Pupil Asset team, so that they can share and answer any questions directly and to make sure that they are all informed and using it appropriately and are making the most of the power of the system.
Working with Pupil Asset to develop our own assessment system
We have developed our own assessment system along with Stella Mead from Pupil Asset specifically to match the language and approach we have and to fit the needs of the Trust.
We have also been working on our own assessments for Religious Education which is beyond the current statutory frameworks working with Stella alongside some of our schools, and a nationally renowned expert in RE.
We are developing an assessment system that will be very robust and can be used nationally as a very strong model.
Kate Agget, Assistant Head – St Andrew’s Preparatory School, Kenya
“All the hard work is done for you – Pupil Asset is straightforward to use and produces analysis that we can instantly use to inform our teaching and learning.”
Kate is the assistant head at St Andrew’s Preparatory School, in Turi, which is in the Great Rift Valley to the North West of Nairobi, and teaches pupils aged 5 to 13 years. Children from across Africa and Europe study at the school which follows the British National Curriculum.
“We bought into Pupil Asset as I’d come across it briefly in my last school and we needed an intelligent, intuitive system which was quick and easy to use and most importantly allowed staff to spend more time using the analysis of data than doing it!
We love that with PA all the hard work is done for you, it is straightforward to use and produces analysis that we can instantly use to inform our teaching and learning.
Virtually without exception our staff have seen an almost instant impact on their teaching, knowledge of the curriculum and interaction with parents.
With everything at their fingertips, staff can take great confidence from the fact they can immediately identify and evidence pupils’ strengths and weaknesses, know their individual progress through the curriculum and share this with parents and colleagues easily and transparently.
We also love that we can create and track against our own bespoke frameworks, relevant to our unique curriculum and cultural setting.
In an educational climate where assessment is in danger of being somewhat directionless, we have been fully supported in creating a system that tracks in a way we value and that is meaningful and purposeful for our staff and pupils. Pupil Asset’s support in helping us innovate these bespoke tracking solutions has been second to none.”
David How – Headteacher at Beaver Road, Manchester
David How has been Headteacher at Beaver Road, Manchester for 14 years.
Here, he tells us about how the school moved to Pupil Asset and the results they’ve seen.
“Beaver Row has been an Outstanding school since 2011.
We moved to Pupil Asset in 2017 after speaking with another local school in the area, who shared lots of learning on how best to use it.
We knew the school was Outstanding, but we weren’t happy with the data we previously used – we’d abandoned levels and were using our own system, which teachers were struggling to use.
Pupil Asset’s Training Team were great to work with in setting up our own framework. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach like other systems, Pupil Asset adapts to our concept perfectly.
Pupil Asset is far simpler to use than previous systems and class teachers have picked it up with minimal training.
Now, teachers are able to easily track progress and act immediately.
The assessment is easily accessible for class teachers, and not just the senior leadership team – their planning is better, and decisions and adjustments can be made faster which means results have improved.
The Quality Assurance inspector told us that our quality and learning was excellent – if we hadn’t have switched to Pupil Asset, we wouldn’t have got that level of specificity.
Pupil Asset has made a significant positive improvement on the school and it’s now even better than when it was graded as Outstanding in 2011.”
Become a Pupil Asset Schools Partner
Over the years Pupil Asset has developed in response to the changing needs of our schools, and to the reforms imposed by the Department of Education.
In order to enable our product to develop further, we rely on the wealth of experience that you and your staff offer us in your constructive feedback, which enables us to improve and streamline our services.
If you would be interested in becoming a Pupil Asset schools partner, please contact us on 01603 631436 (opt 2).