The Ofsted call for an inspection of the trust’s lead school comes in during the biggest peak in Covid-related absence for pupils and staff since schools had fully returned.

To prove this is the case, the trust’s attendance data is quickly filtered down to school level, which verifies pupil attendance has dropped by 6 per cent in two weeks, with 25 members of staff currently absent.

This means, for the first time since September, the Covid-related absence rate has jumped from an average of 1 per cent to 4 per cent. While the school’s attendance is above the national average for similar schools, the trend is negative compared to the positive trend nationally.

Given that it is a special school, staff absence would have a significant impact on the school’s ability to demonstrate its effectiveness. Armed with this information, the case for a deferral is made and the deferral is granted.

The power of live data

This is the power of a bespoke data dashboard that uses a combination of both live data and data that is presented over time.

As a trust, we have embraced the data dashboard as an analytical reporting tool for around 18 months now and it has become a powerful tool in our day-to-day operations, from spotting trends like the above to helping reduce workload for leaders.

The idea for the tool came from a desire we had for a platform that would give insight into the data that our existing management information system (MIS) just could not provide. We spoke first to the development team behind our MIS but the analytical tool they offered could not replicate our vision.

So, using the same freely available software, a two-hour instructional YouTube video and a stack of Post-it notes, we set about building our own tool in-house and entirely from scratch - based on our vision and our needs.

This was built on Microsoft’s Power BI platform and involved carefully selecting the data that we needed to regularly revisit and interrogate, both from our MIS and a range of other external sources, in a single location to provide rapid access and insight on a raft of key areas, such as:

• A self-evaluation tool for schools: Each principal assesses the extent to which the school has met the “good” criteria from the Education Inspection Framework. Likewise, the trust education team carries out the same task. The dashboard then compares the self-evaluations of the two to create discourse and inform school improvement.
• A tool for tracking trust key performance indicators (KPIs): Using pre-defined criteria, individuals can assess progress against their KPIs. The dashboard presents this as comparable, termly progress percentages.
• A compliance tool: The dashboard presents risks, colour-coded to match severity, and compliance information in areas such as health and safety and fire, which can be filtered down to school level and actioned accordingly.
• Showing where the gaps are in the expertise of our local governing bodies (LGB): The dashboard tallies the number of LGB members across the trust, against their schools and a pre-determined list of expert areas, enabling the user to filter down to each school to ascertain which areas of expertise are unfilled and where that expertise can be drawn from.

Supporting growth

Perhaps where our dashboard really excels, though, is in its ability to demonstrate the trust’s capacity for growth with the aptly named Growth Capacity Dashboard.

This can, at any given time, map out the needs of a school and create scenarios for support, which can be “plugged” into our total hours of centralised support.

So, for example, in a recent presentation to a potential school interested in joining the trust, when asked how confident we were that the trust had the capacity to support the needs of the school to ensure rapid progress, we turned on the dashboard and plugged the school’s needs in. Immediately, the dashboard’s capacity gauge jumped from 58.9 per cent to 69.1 per cent. 

Not only did we have the capacity to accommodate their needs, we still had capacity to spare. This reassurance went a long way, backing up the claim that was made earlier in our pitch to them, that “the support they needed would be available when they needed it”.

Retaining autonomy

Of course, it is important to note, we are not reliant on the dashboard; it doesn’t take away any leader’s ability to think for themselves or make decisions.

It does, however, provide leaders with essential and wide-reaching information about the schools and trust, enabling them to make those decisions confidently.

As a final example of its power, a few months after the deferral mentioned above when Ofsted came to inspect the school, the data dashboard was invaluable once again.

Having heard what was often described as “horror stories” regarding the interrogation of a school’s attendance, we created a tool within the dashboard that told the narrative of attendance following Covid and mapped the school’s attendance against the reported national rates for the sector.

On that first day of inspection, that “horror story” conversation lasted a matter of minutes; the inspector could clearly see how our attendance was performing against the current national average, we were thanked, and he promptly moved on to the next topic.

That’s the power of a live data dashboard.

Matt Morris is the director of education and achievement at TEAM Education Trust.

He will be one of the speakers at the upcoming Schools and Academies Show in London. Tes are media partner for the event. Find out more and register for free by visiting the Schools and Academies Show website