St Patrick’s College in Maghera, is one of a number of schools throughout Northern Ireland to spearhead the use of standardised real time data to make ‘real’ improvements to pupils’ performance.
St Patrick’s College, which has Specialist Science Status, has an enrolment of around 1300 and 90 staff. It has a long and proven track record of innovation and change so it was no surprise when it was selected by to pilot the Assessment Manager and Lesson Monitor modules of SIMS.
As one of the pilot schools for the Revised Curriculum, St Patrick’s was asked by CCEA to trial the use of the Profiles module for reporting to parents in 2007/2008. Dympna Devlin, Senior Leader for Assessment, explains how, with much needed support from Mr Brian McAuley, North-Eastern C2K centre, Assessment Manager and Profiles modules were used to produce the end-of-year profiles for Year 8. In 2008/2009, Dympna extended this to reporting for Years 9, 10 and 11. In the current academic year the annual winter reports for Years 12, 13 and 14 were also produced using Assessment Manager and Profiles modules.
ICT is central to teaching and learning at St Patrick’s and teachers make extensive use of SIMS - Capita’s MIS software - to support good practice across the curriculum and throughout the school.
The requirement to record and analyse continuous assessment data has the propensity to create a major headache for teachers so they were understandably relieved when they realised that SIMS could give comprehensive data analysis at the stroke of a keyboard with none of the customary angst associated with number crunching.
Following a successful pilot with KS4 science classes and in keeping with St Patrick’s ethos of striving for excellence and sharing good practice across the school, Assessment Manager is now being introduced for other year groups.
Dympna explains how a ‘traffic lights’ system was introduced when piloting the use of Assessment Manager to monitor the performance of Year 12 pupils as part of the College’s Assertive Mentoring programme. The new system was designed and developed for Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5 by Mr Quinn and Mr Mc Gale respectively.
“It’s like an early warning system to flag up potential problems so that prompt and appropriate steps can be taken to provide the necessary support.”
Working on the principle ‘what gets measured gets done’, Dympna says Assessment Manager is feeding into short-term and long-term strategic objectives of the assessment management policy at St Patrick’s.
“In the short term, it helps bring about focused improvements by identifying in ‘real time’ under-performing students and enables constructive intervention in a timely fashion. Data from Assessment Manager can be linked to data from Lesson Monitor which is used to record other data pertaining to pupils’ performance such as attendance, behaviour, effort, forgotten homeworks of individual pupils and so on.”
Dympna says that this way, problems can be identified early and the necessary action taken. “There is no need to wait until the annual parents’ night. If there is a problem with a child’s performance across subjects, parents are notified so that they can work alongside the teachers to improve it.”
Martin Quinn, Head of Technology at St Patrick’s says that Assessment Manager will also result in long-term strategic improvements.
“We collate data on how pupils are performing across all subjects in Key Stage 2 through to the end of Key Stage 5. This will show how pupils have moved on from one level to the next and identify areas for improvement. In the past, the task of collating all this data would have been far too time consuming, but with Assessment Manager it is a relatively straightforward task.”
As well as recording ongoing assessment marks and grades to meet the school’s statutory assessment requirements, Assessment Manager can record other scores such as MidYIS and Yellis.
Martin continues: “When we analyse the detailed data provided by Assessment Manager and Lesson Monitor, we can see how individual pupils are performing. Having identified the strengths and weaknesses of individual pupils, teachers can then collaborate to set realistic and achievable targets.”
He adds that the pastoral care element of Lesson Monitor is very important.
“It highlights patterns which may indicate why a particular child is falling behind. Sometimes the necessary support is emotional and teachers can work with the pupils to develop an individual study skills programme.”
Julian McGale, Head of Department and Specialist Science Co-ordinator at St Patrick’s agrees, saying that data provided by Assessment Manager and Lesson Monitor give teachers a sound basis for giving feedback to parents.
“Parents are more accepting of a teacher’s appraisal of how their child is performing when they see the detailed information captured by SIMS.”
As part of their own ongoing professional development, teachers have access to training and technical support from C2k to ensure that they are getting the most out of SIMS.
Julian adds: “Teachers are finding that the Assessment Manager and Lesson Monitor modules are not only making a real difference to their workload but helping to improve overall pupils’ performance.”
As the modules currently underdevelopment become more established, St Patrick’s will introduce a ‘Learning Gateway’ so that parents can have instant access to their child’s data. This will be coupled to the use of data from the Fischer Family Trust (FFT) to establish motivational targets and standardised value added measures.
St Patrick’s is also looking at providing training in the use of Assessment Manager for feeder primary schools. Julian says this will lead to an agreed standardised test and transfer of data to facilitate diagnostic assessment of children and ensure that they are placed in a class according to their ability.
www.stpatricksmaghera.org
