CM Academy, SLT pathway, Level 4

Outcome: Can use Classroom Monitor to inform dialogue with teachers; impacting pupil progress

Why it matters: Pupil Progress Meetings are a well-embedded part of school life and are seen as an effective way of monitoring and impacting on standards within school. Once you have been using Classroom Monitor for a while, you will find that there are ways that you can use the information held in the system to make these even more effective and impactful

Time to complete: 30 minutes



Using Classroom Monitor in Pupil Progress Meetings

The Pupil Progress Meeting has been a long-term staple in schools. It’s an opportunity to discuss progress and a chance for SLT to focus on each class at a time, giving them a bigger picture and route forward than data alone can provide. Classroom Monitor has been designed to allow you to easily identify trends and generate headline data but then provides a number of routes to dig deeper to identify where pupil progress can best be impacted.


How well is the class attaining against expectations?

The Class Group Overviews give you the opportunity to start from the bigger picture and identify areas for further investigation. There is a version for looking at Markbook data (School Overview Reports> Class Group Overview) and a version for looking at External Data (External Data Reports>Ext. Data Class Group Overview). Both allow you to analyse attainment for a class against current expectations for their age group; overall and for sub-groups in the class. 


In this example below, we can see that this class doesn't seem to be doing as well in maths as in reading and writing; girls are significantly outperforming boys in maths; and the child receiving Pupil Premium in the class is doing well. These give me areas that I may want to explore further with the group teacher. Although this is an overview report, you can click on any of the numbers if you want to find out the names of the pupils included in the cell.


Bear in mind that this works on age related expectations so we may have to focus on some children with SEND separately.


Are the class making good progress?

The matrix reports are great way to visualise the progress that is being made by the class. In a Pupil Progress Meeting they are particularly useful for monitoring how pupils have progressed this year and/or from the end of the previous key stage. When generating the report, you can select the data that you want to appear on the horizontal and vertical. As with the overview reports, you can set which scores go into which attainment band when you generate the report and this is shown in the Legend at the bottom of the report.


In this example, 'Show Overlay' just above the grid has been clicked. This helps you to easily identify: the cells representing pupils who are in a higher category than previously (green); the pupils in the same category as previously (white); and the pupils in a lower category than previously (buff). There is also an 'overlay summary' below the grid which summarises this data.



You can find out which pupils are in a particular cell by clicking on it; the names will then be listed on the right. In the example above we have clicked on all of the cells containing pupils in a lower category than the selected starting point and can see their names on the right. These may represent pupils that we want to look at further with the teacher in order to plan some intervention.


Planning group intervention

Once you have looked at the high level data, it is likely that you have identified some pupils that require some further focus. Of course, the teacher will have lots of knoweldge about these pupils to share and Classroom Monitor can be used to guide and develop this conversation. It may be helpful to create a group of these pupils in Classroom Monitor to help you with these further investigations and subsequent tracking; this can be done by SLT or admin users in the Settings area.


Once you have created the group, it will be useful to load a report on them in Group Tracking > Curriculum Tracking. This will summarise attainment for the group at an objective level so that you can identify trends and areas of common focus to help plan intervention.


In this example, we can see that none of the focus pupils are secure in any of these objectives and also which ones need the most work. Again, we can click on the numbers to find out the names of the pupils in any cell to help plan for individual differences as required.


The Curriculum Tracking report can also be useful on a whole class basis if it has been identified that there are subjects which the whole class needs to focus on. It can help identify areas where resources, CPD or targeted teaching may be required.


Focusing on individuals

In some instances, it may be beneficial to look at pupils on an individual basis and the Reports area can be used for this. There are three Report types available:

  • Pupil Attainment Report: This will show you how well a pupil has achieved in objectives that they have been assessed in in the timeframe selected.

  • Pupil Progress Report: This will show a pupil's attainment in individual objectives on dates selected. A good way to see where progress has and hasn't happened for that pupil.

  • Pupil Evidence Report: This collates comments and photos that have been recorded as evidence in the markbooks so can give some context to discussions.