A strategic approach to developing your use of student data

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Schools in England have, as James Pembroke and I explain in Dataproof Your School, a licence to change the way they think about student data. As we say in the book, “Schools can and must adapt assessment and data systems to ensure they are focused on supporting pupils.”
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So how should schools go about making changes to achieve this aim?

Think about what you want to know

The first step is to consider what information you actually want to know about the educational experience of the students in your school. We have good evidence from the Educational Endowment Foundation about the areas on which schools should focus their efforts to support their students. Their report, The Guide to the Pupil Premium*, identifies the follow three areas:

• High Quality teaching – to ensure students are in the best position to learn
• Targeted Academic Support – for students who need additional support
• Wider Strategies – to ensure students are in school, in class and able to focus

​The following graphic, available on the EEF website distils the report’s recommendations:

Additional evidence from the Great Teaching Toolkit’s Evidence Review suggest that effective teaching can be summarised as

• Understanding the content
• Creating a supportive environment
• Maximising opportunity to learn
• Activating hard thinking.

From this, it is clear that ensuring that students are working hard to learn – that they are focused on learning what we want them to – is key. In Dataproof Your School, we summarise this research by saying that schools should focus their efforts on ensuring that students are in school, in class, focused and learning. Your data should help you keep track of this over time so that you can create useful summaries for students who need support in any of these areas.

*Whilst the EEF focus on students in receipt of Pupil Premium funding, there is good reason to think that focusing on these areas will support all students in school.

What information do you need to gather and collate?

We split the information you need to capture and store into four different areas.
These are:

• Contextual Data – personal data which may affect learning
• Attainment Data – results of assessments
• Development Data – effort and attitude to learning over time
• Provision Data - strategies put in place to support pupils’ learning

Identifying which data you will gather and collate is key to minimising the time and effort required to take control of your student data. Once this student data is specified, you can begin to reduce the amount of time it takes to get information from the classroom to your student database by standardising systems and supporting staff as you minimise the effort required to get student data to where it needs to be.

A key consideration when specifying which data to gather and collate to support your work with students is to futureproof your data as much as possible. The longer you are able to collect particular categories of student data, the more you will build up a picture of your students, your classes, your cohorts and of your school.

How might you deal with misconceptions about student data?

Teachers are well versed in dealing with misconceptions which their students may have. Once again, the EEF has good summaries and guidance on the subject.

You should also consider what misconceptions regarding student data your staff might have. Many school staff – particularly those who came into the profession a few years ago, when the data landscape looked very different – may not have had much professional development in understanding the benefits and limitations of assessment data, for example.

Many teachers have not had much training in the theory behind formal assessment – and standardised assessment in general – and therefore may not understand the thinking which underpins the inferences which can be made from results of this type of assessment.

In many schools, readily available data is often underutilised when it comes to understanding students; age within cohort, for example, is known to have a clear affect at population level, and assessment data from earlier phases of schooling may not be used as effectively as they might be. Schools now collect extensive data on children in the Foundation Stage, for example, which may not be well understood by those teaching classes of older students. Results from the Phonics Screening Check are often overlooked at later points in a student’s journey through school, even though this data can often be extremely useful in understanding potential misconceptions or difficulties students might face.

Data on medical or attendance issues, additional support a student has received, or disruption caused by staff illness or absence – which may provide teachers in subsequent school years valuable insight into potential gaps in curriculum knowledge - is often lacking at later points in students’ careers.

Creating time and space for development in Data Literacy – understanding these kinds of issues relating to student data – may be a key area for development in your school.

How are you going to make the changes you need?
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Yet another useful resource here is the EEF’s A School’s Guide to implementation. It uses ideas which will be familiar to teachers to help schools to use a version of the “assess, plan, do and review” cycle to ensure that any changes which you make are likely to have a lasting impact.

In order to ensure that any changes you make are effective, you need to engage your staff and key stakeholders, to ensure that what you are intending to change is well understood and to reflect and adapt as necessary.

Once you are ready to implement change, you need to ensure that the change is evidence-informed, that it is the right change to make and is feasible in the time you allocate to making changes. You then need to ensure that you put effective systems and structure in place to enable the change to happen. Finally, you need the right people in the team which will steer the change through to implementation.

All of this has to be supported by the “explore; prepare; deliver; sustain” cycle, which ensures that you move forward with purpose, making gradual improvements, checking and adapting as you proceed.
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Richard Selfridge is an Education Data Consultant who has supported schools and MATs across the country to develop of their use of student data. He began working with Insight Tracking in April 2024 having worked with Jamie Pembroke, Insight’s Director of Strategy, on many projects in the last ten years.