School-devised data systems and Excel spreadsheets
An NFER report commissioned by the then DfEE to assess the use of data in teaching and learning (Research Report No 671, 2006) reached the conclusion that “School-devised systems and Excel spreadsheets are the most popular data management tools” in Primary schools.
But the question then arises, why do Primary teachers prefer these tools?
Seemingly the answers are because these systems are perceived as easy to use and produce outcomes that are easy to interpret.
The systems are also used to track individual pupils and are thought to give schools the flexibility they need to input internally generated data, such as interim assessments and targets.
This is probably still true today. But such systems do have their limitations:
First, they tend to be inflexible – if you have a class sheet but want to look at a vulnerable sub-group, it may not be quick and easy to extract that data.
Secondly, colour coding can help you to interpret the data, but it often has to be applied by hand.
Likewise a good graph can summarise a page of data and make it understandable, but you have to be quite an expert to produce anything more complex than a simple bar chart in Excel.
Which is why, once we start thinking about overall efficiency in school, the issue is not always one of having the cheapest and simplest system – especially if one then has to do extra manual work at the end to get the most important information out of the system.
The ideal, of course, is one that allows you to ask almost any question in order to analyse the behaviour or results of specific groups, such as the special needs children, summer born children, Turkish born boys, children from bi-lingual families…
In short, what can make the whole analysis and decision-making process more efficient is a system where coding is automatic and graphs can be produced by pressing a button.
One company “Primary Progress Toolkit” believe that they have produced just this, and a small but growing band of schools seem to agree. When shown the Toolkit, one head who had devised a system which was good enough to be used by other local schools, said: “Yes, that’s what I would have liked my system to be, if I had the time and the skills to produce it”.
It seems to me that if you want more information from your data, without creating more work for yourself, it is worth a look. The details are at… www.primaryprogresstoolkit.co.uk. You can ring 01279 652183 for a demonstration.