Management Information System (MIS) for schools
Expert ideas for a better working life at your school or trust
Assessment
Category : Blog
GCSE and A-Level Results Days are going to look a little different this year. Some schools will be sharing results with students in-person in bubbles, while others will be managing the whole process remotely. However you need to run your Results Days this year, we know your top priorities will be making sure the day
GCSE and A-Level Results Days are going to look a little different this year. Some schools will be sharing results with students in-person in bubbles, while others will be managing the whole process remotely.
However you need to run your Results Days this year, we know your top priorities will be making sure the day goes smoothly, the results get to the right people at the right time, and students get the support they need.
That’s why we’ve made it simple and straightforward to import, share and analyse your results with Arbor. Check out our overview below of all the ways we’re supporting you this year to manage your Results Day successfully.
Our Support Team is full of secondary and exam specialists who will be on hand throughout both Results Days, as well as the days before, on phone, webchat and email. This year, they’ll also be available from 6.30am on 19th August to give you extra support with preparing your GCSE results.
We’ve added lots of materials on our Help Centre to support you with preparing, organising, sharing and analysing your results. We also hosted a webinar last week walking you through the basics – you can catch the recording here.
The Arbor Community is always buzzing around Results Day with Exams Officers, Office Managers and SLT sharing tips and best practice. If you haven’t already, join the forum for free today!
As soon as results are available, importing them into Arbor is quick and easy. Your results dashboard will flag any errors in your data so you can resolve them straight away. Plus, you can also reverse the results import if you need to.
We’ve teamed up with industry-leading analytics tools that schools love, including 4Matrix, SISRA and ALPS Connect, to make it easy for you to analyse your results in depth. Simply export your results from Arbor into a spreadsheet for quick upload into your chosen platform.
When it comes to releasing results to staff, you can easily set up your embargo time and date, and control who has access to results before and after this time.
On Results Day, you can choose from lots of different options for sharing results with parents. You can download results both in bulk and as individual PDFs, which you could either print out and distribute in person, or share electronically (note, we’d advise adding password protection to each student’s PDF statement). Share your results in a way that’s right for you:
Since there may be a mixture of some students collecting their results remotely and some in-person at staggered times, it could be a challenge to make sure every student gets the right support from staff on the day. To help you keep track of the contact students receive and the follow up needed, we recommend setting up a log sheet in Excel/Google Sheets to record key points of contact and resolutions on the day. This will also be a useful reference if you have to process any appeals.
Add key student details (e.g. name, SEN, PP, EAL, CLA), then add columns for the milestones you want to record, for example if the student has had communication from staff and how (e.g. email/telephone), if they have requested their teacher-assessed grades and if a follow-up is needed.
Here’s an example of what this log sheet could look like:
Top tips:
If you’d like to find out more about how Arbor MIS could transform the way you work, our team would be happy to show you around in a virtual demo – simply book here. Alternatively, give us a call on 0208 050 1028 or email hello@arbor-education.com.
Assessment | School Operations
A-Level and GCSE results days are amongst the busiest days in any school’s calendar. We’ve compiled this guide and checklist to help the day go as smoothly as possible. 1. Import results files Results files can either be downloaded from the awarding organisation’s online portal or automatically received using the A2C transport application. Once you
A-Level and GCSE results days are amongst the busiest days in any school’s calendar. We’ve compiled this guide and checklist to help the day go as smoothly as possible.
1. Import results files
Results files can either be downloaded from the awarding organisation’s online portal or automatically received using the A2C transport application. Once you have received your results files, it’s then a case of importing them into your MIS.
Arbor’s MIS makes this process very easy by automatically identifying any problems when you upload your results files. Don’t worry about importing QN (Qualification Number) files, creating grade sets, or entering discount codes; because Arbor MIS is in the cloud, this is all done for you.
Image 1: A screenshot showing how results files are imported onto Arbor MIS
2. Set embargo date/times
The JCQ stipulates that only the school’s Exams Officer, Senior Leadership and other selected members of staff can have access to results before the official publication date. To ensure that this happens, it is essential that an “embargo date” is set in your MIS. The embargo date ensures that results can only be viewed by other members of staff, students and parents the day after results are published.
Setting an embargo is straightforward in Arbor. When you upload results files, you’ll be asked to enter an embargo date. Arbor automatically assumes that the Examinations Officer and Head Teacher will have access to results files before the embargo date, but it’s really simple to add more staff members as “pre-embargo” viewers if you’d like.
Image 2: A screenshot showing how to set an embargo date in Arbor MIS
3. Manually enter the results for any non-EDI qualifications
In the case of qualifications that don’t support EDI results files, results need to be manually added into your MIS. Non-EDI results can be viewed and downloaded from the awarding organisation’s secure portal.
Arbor’s Exams module supports all Ofqual recognised qualifications. Non-EDI qualifications can be easily added to your centre’s qualification offering. Arbor manges all the information for non-EDI qualifications centrally, so there’s no need to manually add information such as award and/or learning unit names and combinations.
Image 3: A screenshot showing where to enter non-EDI qualifications in Arbor MIS
4. Export results to a data analysis application
There are a number of excellent and intuitive third party data analysis tools available to schools (some schools have their own Excel templates, or prefer to use an analysis tool such as SISRA, 4Matrix or ALPS Connect for this purpose). After all the candidates’ results have been loaded into your MIS, the next step is to export them for analysis. To get the most out of your exams day data analysis, you should have exported assessment data at selected periods (“data drops”) throughout the year; this will allow your school’s Data Manager and Heads of Department to analyse student’s progress throughout the year.
Importing data into a third party data analysis tool can either be done from within the application itself, or by creating a marksheet with the relevant student and exam result that can be re-imported into the application.
We know that creating marksheets to export exam data is incredibly time-consuming – that’s why Arbor’s Exams module has multiple, powerful out-of-the-box reporting tools that allow you to export candidates’ results in a few clicks. If you want more flexibility to create your own reports, you can also use Arbor’s Custom Report Writer which lets you quickly and easily compile custom marksheets that contain any data point from your MIS.
Image 4: A screenshot showing how export candidate results from Arbor MIS
5. Print candidate’s Statement of Results
After you have completed your results analysis, it’s advisable to print out paper copies of candidates’ Statement of Results. Remember, only the relevant members of staff should be able to see these results before the release date. This means that all printed content should only be handled by theses members of staff. When the Statement of Results have been printed, they must be stored in a safe and secure place until the following day.
Image 5: A screenshot of how candidates’ Statement of Results appear in Arbor
6. Electronically share results with parents and guardians
The nervous thrill of opening your exam result is something that none of us ever forget. Opening the envelope is usually followed by a phone call home to tell loved ones. Students will be making plans for college, university and the rest of their lives; teachers will be on hand to offer congratulations, advice and support.
It’s not always possible for parents, guardians and students to be in school on results day, and amidst all the excitement, it’s not uncommon for Statements of Results to get spoilt or lost! With this in mind, it’s wise to share students’ exam results with their parents and guardians electronically too. Your MIS provider should give you the option to do this.
If your school is using the Arbor App, parents will be able to see their child’s exam results by selecting ‘Examinations’ in the menu. Parents can view a list of their child’s exam results or download a printable PDF. If you don’t want to share students’ exam results with parents via the Arbor App, or you would like to wait until after results day, all of this can be managed in Arbor MIS.
Image 6: A screenshot of how examination results appear in the Arbor App
Using Arbor MIS? Need help on Results Day?
We have a comprehensive online help guide that addresses all the questions that you may have. Still stuck? Our customer team will be on hand to help you!
If you’d like to find out more about how our simple, smart cloud-based MIS could help you transform the way your secondary school works, contact us. You can also book a demo by calling 0207 043 0470 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
A number of factors are making schools and MATs look again at the data they gather and use around pupil attainment and progress. These include, but are not limited to: Reducing teacher workload The proposed new, less data reliant, Ofsted Framework The challenge of standardising teacher assessments Balancing the autonomy that schools require to meet
A number of factors are making schools and MATs look again at the data they gather and use around pupil attainment and progress. These include, but are not limited to:
The traditional model in schools has, for some time, been a combination of formative assessment and summative teacher assessment.
Tracking formative assessment takes many forms, from simple notes against lesson plans to more formal ‘rubrics’ where banks of statements are ‘ticked off’. Whatever level of recording is used by schools, this is the main vehicle for improvement in student achievement as it’s ongoing and informs future provision.
Since the removal of ‘levels’, there’s been a huge amount of time spent by schools coming up with alternative summative assessment models. A lot of these ended up looking very much like the levels they were supposed to replace!
Whatever the summative model, the greatest challenges of a teacher-determined summative judgement have remained the same; ensuring consistency and validity of these judgements, and managing the workload caused by creating, moderating and collating judgements (let alone analysing the outcomes!)
There is also clear pressure from Ofsted to stop using flight paths to judge whether pupils’ progress is as desired. Only this weekend, Sean Harford (HMI and Ofsted’s National Director for Education) made it clear that this approach to target setting is, in his opinion, potentially demotivating. Flight paths are intrinsically linked to the use of summative teacher assessment scales – each implies the other is a valid approach.
In summary; schools and MATs face a real challenge. It’s essential for leaders to know the success, or otherwise, of their provision. This is particularly difficult for MATs as they scale and begin to cover a wider geographical area (and manage ever higher pupil and school numbers). Without attainment data then desktop surveys of the success, or otherwise, of schools and teachers is not possible.
What is needed is a method of providing the data required whilst reducing teacher workload, ensuring consistency of judgement and, depending on your approach, moving away from flight-paths.
This is where commercial standardised testing comes in. It solves many of the problems associated with summative teacher judgement:
The final piece of the jigsaw in getting standardised testing to work in your school or MAT is making sure you have analytics that are informative and easily aggregated.
Some MIS systems should be able to do this for you. For example, Arbor’s integration with RS Assessments’ PiRA and PUMA testing aggregates all of your test outcome data into the school and MAT MIS, with no extra data downloads and uploads, for easy and insightful analytics. Teachers can use the strand level analysis provided by RS Assessments to more accurately plan future curriculum content to meet the needs of the pupils. Senior leaders at schools and MATs can also use Arbor MIS to take action on their results – for example, by setting up intervention groups, or by building custom reports combining data from their PiRA and PUMA test results and Arbor MIS. If you don’t have access to this kind of analysis, many standardised test providers will offer their own dashboards or reporting services.
Fig 1.: Using Arbor’s integration with PiRA & PUMA tests in Arbor MIS
By adopting standardised assessments in place of teacher determined summative judgements, the time saved can be put back into planning and delivering great learning experiences for pupils whilst ensuring school and MAT leaders can still evaluate the outcomes achieved.
Get in touch to book a free demo to find out how Arbor MIS and RS Assessments from Hodder Education could transform your school or MAT, call us on 0208 050 1028 or email us at tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
For current customers: contact your Arbor Customer Success Manager or Account Manager to get this integration set up!
As I’m sure you’ve heard, School Pupil Tracker Online (SPTO) will be closing down at the end of this year. If you currently use SPTO, you’ll be looking for something to replace it with the same (if not better!) level of functionality and analysis, so this is a great opportunity to look at how you’re
As I’m sure you’ve heard, School Pupil Tracker Online (SPTO) will be closing down at the end of this year. If you currently use SPTO, you’ll be looking for something to replace it with the same (if not better!) level of functionality and analysis, so this is a great opportunity to look at how you’re using your current MIS system as a whole. To help you, we’ve written this a short blog explaining how schools & MATs use the integrated assessments module of Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-based MIS to track, analyse and report on pupil progress.
Let’s start with the basics. Like SPTO, Arbor’s assessments module covers the following:
1. Formative Tracking: In Arbor, teachers can enter marks against curriculum statements and view formative analysis. This helps inform lesson planning and differentiate learning based on students’ understanding of the curriculum. You can either use preset or imported curriculum frameworks, or create your own custom curriculum framework in the system:
Image 1: A teacher marking a formative reading assessment
2. Summative Tracking: You can also access marksheets, enter marks for summative & ad hoc assessments, and view and export analysis for summative, ad hoc and 3rd party standardised assessments (such as PiRA and PUMA tests from RS Assessments by Hodder Education)
Image 2: Grade distribution dashboard analysing a summative assessment
Arbor also has some more in-depth, out-of-the-box analysis tools to help you dig deeper into your assessment data:
3a. Attainment over Time allows you to see how many students are achieving each grade during different assessment periods. The date chosen provides a breakdown of the available grades at that given point in time:
Image 3: Measuring Attainment Over Time
You can also choose to group students by demographic, in order to compare grades. For example, you can compare girls to boys and identify that girls currently require more support in this subject:
Image 4: Comparing students by demographic
3b. Below, At or Above: The Below, At or Above page allows schools to see the percentage of children who are below/at/above their targets for each assessment period:
Image 5: Tracking pupil progress using Below, At or Above, and clicking on a record to retrieve a slideover of students
3c. Analysis at MAT level: Some assessments, like PiRA & PUMA, even push up to Arbor’s Group MIS for dashboard analysis across schools:
Image 6: A screenshot of aggregated data in Arbor’s Group MIS
Image 7: A plain-text callout explaining your data
4. Most importantly though, the biggest benefit of using assessments in Arbor MIS is that it’s a fully-integrated module that syncs up with all the other data in your MIS system. This means:
Interested in finding out more about how Arbor’s simple, smart, cloud-based MIS could transform the way your school works? Get in touch with us via the contact form on our website or give us a call on 0208 050 1028
Arbor Updates | Assessment
We’re delighted to announce our new partnership with assessment experts RS Assessment from Hodder Education on a new integration between Arbor’s MIS for schools & MATs and RS Assessment’s standardised tests for primary schools. RS Assessment’s standardised tests PIRA and PUMA are a key component of many primary school improvement strategies, helping Senior Leaders track
We’re delighted to announce our new partnership with assessment experts RS Assessment from Hodder Education on a new integration between Arbor’s MIS for schools & MATs and RS Assessment’s standardised tests for primary schools.
RS Assessment’s standardised tests PIRA and PUMA are a key component of many primary school improvement strategies, helping Senior Leaders track pupils’ in-year progress and benchmark against age related expectations. They’ve become even more crucial for MATs recently, as central teams at growing MATs need the ability to monitor and support school improvement across multiple schools and get an overview of whole Trust performance. RS Assessment’s MARK (My Assessment and Reporting Kit) online service is pivotal to providing time-saving analysis of test results.
Arbor’s cloud-based MIS helps to transform the way schools & MATs work by putting essential data at the fingertips of senior leaders, teachers & office staff, and by automating and simplifying administrative tasks to reduce staff workload. At a MAT level, Arbor MIS centralises not just data reporting, but operations and communications too – helping MATs to manage & support their schools all from just one system.
Our partnership with RS Assessment brings the power of Arbor’s simple, smart cloud-based MIS and the results of PIRA and PUMA tests together for schools and MATs for the first time. Later this year, schools and MATs using Arbor and tracking PIRA and PUMA test results in MARK will be able to:
We’ve worked on this partnership with RS Assessment in collaboration with REAch2 Multi-Academy Trust to ensure it works just as seamlessly for MAT leaders as it does for individual primary schools. To learn more about how we can support your school or MAT, contact us on 0208 050 1028 or email tellmemore@arbor-education.com.
You can also learn more about our integration with Hodder at our specialist User Group at BETT this year! It’s a great opportunity to learn how the integration works, meet other schools & MATs using both products, and catch up with our teams. Click here to sign up for your free place.
Five years have passed since the 2013 review of the National Curriculum first gave schools the chance to Assess Without Levels (AWOL).
In this blog, I’ll talk about the initial interpretations of these reforms, the challenges that they created for schools and just how this opportunity can be used to meet the needs of learners more effectively. With over 13 years of teaching under my belt, this blog is informed by my own personal experience, and I’d welcome any stories that you may have about ‘going AWOL’ with assessments in the last few years!
Into the unknown
In 2013 I was appointed Deputy Head of a special school for children with Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) needs. Assessment reforms had just been announced, so it was a tricky time to venture into leadership as I had to really challenge my own position on assessments (at the same time as getting to grips with being a Senior Leader). I became involved in local focus groups, during which we would collectively try to make sense of what the changes meant for our schools (having been given very little official guidance on the matter!). We spent a lot of time going over our options before ultimately reverting back to a ‘safety in numbers’ approach, deciding to assess using statistically driven systems. In many ways, this wasn’t so different from levels…!
On reflection, this sudden autonomy to assess any way we liked was, whilst being a step in the right direction, perhaps too big a change for many teachers. The majority of qualified teachers practicing in England who were tasked with carrying out AWOL reforms came into the profession after 1989 (levels were introduced at the same time as the National Curriculum to schools in England & Wales under the Education Reform Act 1988). Therefore, most people involved in school level decision making, myself included, had very little experience of assessing in a way that wasn’t primarily focussed on national benchmarking and age-related expectations.
1. Why do we assess? For the school or for the child? The research driving the 2013 assessment reforms discovered that in higher performing jurisdictions around the world, children master fewer concepts but in greater depth. Educators make sure key concepts are mastered before moving students on, rather than pushing them all through curriculum content at a uniform pace. These core AWOL principles have received a wide consensus of support, but haven’t been easily implemented in an educational system where a culture of performance comparison is arguably the primary driver for most decision making.
Knowing that your results are constantly being compared against the school down the road, and that you’ll need to be ready to make a case for your school on an accountability framework at the drop of a hat does create a need for schools to seek external assurances that what they are doing is right. A whole marketplace of curriculum tracking software has therefore opened up to help these schools get this. Numerous standardised assessment frameworks are available to give schools an idea of how their internal tracking fares against other schools also using the system. Whilst this is helpful to schools for the purposes of self-evaluation against national criteria, it’s worth noting that the concepts assessed using these methods are established by externally standardised practice only and are not informed by the contextual needs of the students in the school.
In the pressure cooker environment of school leadership where you are constantly balancing operational demands with strategic decisions, it is completely understandable that opting for standardised approaches is more manageable, and will help you to know if you’re “Good” or not. There is certainly a place for this kind of assessment. However, to improve on this, the context of your learners should also play a large part in determining what else you measure as being appropriate progress for them. This is especially the case for SEN pupils, and in my experience SEMH pupils, where provisioning for individual need is hard work – but undeniably more meaningful and rewarding!
2. The opportunities for AFL in the SEN context Before AWOL, my experience of assessment for SEMH students was that of measuring a specific range of knowledge and skill variables against a national framework and periodically confirming that they were underperforming. I would feed back to them about the ways in which they could improve in these areas but didn’t stop to question the appropriateness of the process itself or the prioritisation of content for them as individuals.
3. When it came to looking at their progress in the purely academic context, they were indeed not making very much. By narrowly focussing on just the academic elements of learning, I was not giving them enough opportunity to build up the cultural capital they would need in order to overcome their difficulties and succeed. It was the learning dispositions such as emotional literacy, self-regulation and conflict resolution that were influencing their lives and decision-making abilities the most, and were also the root cause of academic underperformance in the first place. To be true to the principles of AFL, I needed to incorporate collaborative assessment where pupils became more aware of these metacognitive aspects of learning as well as subject related knowledge and skills.
Aspects of learning such as self-confidence, self-awareness, managing feelings and making relationships receive a lot of attention in the EYFS framework used in early years provision but are broadly left behind in favour of more academic curricula when students reach school age. For many students with SEMH though, these still need to remain at the forefront of their schooling as pushing for academic success can only really be achieved when building from the right social and emotional starting point.
Click here to read the next instalment of my blog, which goes on to talk about how schools can opt for flexible assessments without having to deal with the administrative burden
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.