Photo by Lucélia Ribeiro on Flickr

Children need a great deal of support throughout their learning journey. School is a complex and confusing environment to negotiate, and they need all the help they can get. Arguably one of children’s most important needs is to know how well they are doing (Gardner, 2012) and this is where assessment for learning can play a key role. Although grades matter, more important still is the feedback students receive on their work and performance, and the interventions that teachers can make to support those they see struggling.

Schools also need relevant information about how well their students are progressing. Being able to access complete and up-to-date records of individual students is vital, especially within large cohorts. It’s easy to become lost in a crowd, and in the past spotting individual students who are in trouble, and providing personal intervention, has been a challenge for schools (Blatchford et al, 2002).

Cross-curricular support is also important – if a student is struggling in one subject area, this may simply indicate their need to be supported more in learning around that subject. If a student is struggling in several subject areas however, this may be an indication of an underlying systemic or social problem, requiring more extensive pastoral support.

There is a solution to all of these challenges.

School Management Information Systems are able to alert form tutors, special needs co-ordinators and other specialist teachers within schools when an individual issue arises. One MIS which was created by RM Education, enables teachers to see at a glance, not only a student’s current performance, but their past progress and potential trajectory. The tools hosted by RM Integris are clearly configured and easy to use.

Three key features that Integris offers for students are:

• RM Intelligence: This tool enables data visualisation across the whole student body as well as views of individual students. This is useful for both a personal as well as a holistic view.
• Intervention groups: This is used to monitor specific groups of students that may need extra attention or intervention around behaviour attendance or performance.
• Safeguarding: Information on each student’s home life can be added to their profiles, and specific permissions added so that content can only be viewed by staff members that need access.

Paul Bowlas, Head Teacher at Holy Trinity Church of England Junior School, in Ripon said:

“We were looking for a solution that provided all the information in one place and we found that the way Integris allows you to search and view pupils, particularly the summary page, did just that. We wanted a system that we could populate with our current assessment plans and would link into the contextual details used across the school, so we could at any point, really easily and very quickly, see what was happening with any pupil.” 

Students require a lot of support, but this can only come from the dedicated professionals within the school. Without effective tools, teachers’ efforts will be limited, and often these limitations can arise from a lack of confidence in new technology. However, there is evidence that teachers are beginning to come to terms with integrated systems that are easy to use and offer scaleable functionality across every activity within the daily life of a school.

References
Blatchford, P. et al (2002) Relationships between class size and teaching. American Educational Research Journal, 39 (1), 101-132.
Gardner, J. (Ed: 2012) Assessment and Learning (2nd Edition), London: Sage.

Next time: What teachers need

NB: This post is sponsored by RM Education

What students need by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.