SLT pathway, Level 4

Outcome: Use Classroom Monitor to monitor and enhance school effectiveness

Why it matters: Once Classroom Monitor is embedded within your school, you can start to use the wealth of information stored within it to influence decisions which enhance the effectiveness of your school. 

Time to complete: 15 minutes

 

Monitoring standards

Analysing school performance based on end of key stage data is useful to a point. It can help senior leaders to spot possible trends that they may need to address in their schools. However, there are two issues with this data: firstly, it is historic- those children may have already left school and their data can’t be changed and secondly, it is based on test outcomes which give limited detail in terms of the learning in school. On the other hand, monitoring standards on a regular basis, with data that is being regularly updated, can be acted upon swiftly in time to have an impact on those end of key stage results.


As covered in Learning guide S3a, there are school level overview reports specifically designed to enable SLT to maintain an up to date and comprehensive overview of attainment in your school; allowing you to compare subjects, year groups and key characteristics groups (e.g. Pupil Premium). The School Overview report will summarise up to date data drawn from the markbooks while the External Data Overview will allow get an overview of summative data.

These can enable you to quickly identify areas that are going well alongside areas for potential improvement and further exploration. Remember that you can click directly in these reports to identify individual pupils.

 

Improving standards

While it is great to use data to recognise successes, it is most important to use data to identify issues that can be addressed. Classroom Monitor gives you the opportunity to delve deeper into the issues affecting learning so that you can have an impact on them. Once you have identified children, classes or subjects with potential issues, you can use some of the more detailed reports in the Group Tracking section to explore these so that you can form an action plan to address them.


You also have a range of tools to monitor the impact of these interventions in school once they have occurred. You can see which things have worked and which haven’t. For example, you can assess the effectiveness of specific interventions by tracking the learning of the groups that have received them; you can also assess the impact of new approaches by comparing the attainment of pupils since its introduction to the attainment of pupils before the intervention. 

 

A useful report for digging deeper is Curriculum Tracking which allows you to analyse curriculum coverage across the school. It allows you to see which areas of the curriculum have been taught and which are still to be covered. Later in the year, this is particularly telling as it can flag up where teachers’ own strengths may lie as they naturally cover some areas more than others. Being able to flag subjects or subject areas where standards are weaker can inform decisions in terms of spending on resources and plans for CPD.


Assessment for learning

Too often assessment is seen as ‘data’; something that SLT collate because they have to and something that teachers record because SLT need it. For schools using Classroom Monitor well this should not be the case. Teachers should be recording information because they use it to improve their effectiveness as teachers and improve the outcomes for their pupils. In turn, SLT use the assessment information held within the system to open dialogues with teachers and external bodies, ultimately using it to improve school effectiveness.