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The View From Next Gen

Ian Tufts is Chief Technology Officer at ParentPay Group and as part of his role, he oversees the work around SIMS Next Gen.

Ian Tufts is Chief Technology Officer at ParentPay Group and as part of his role, he oversees the work around SIMS Next Gen.

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With children and teachers having to quickly readjust to school life following the summer holidays, the autumn term is never quiet. Understanding pupil progress, especially at Primary level, is particularly important in these first few weeks as teachers get to know their new classes.

Indeed, the progress of Primary School pupils is exactly what our ‘Assessment Team’ has been focusing on over the past few months.

Initially the team took a deep dive into the challenges that schools, teachers and headteachers are facing when it comes to tracking pupil progress. This identified that in the post-pandemic context, where children missed significant development opportunities, teachers need to have an even fuller understanding of how pupils are progressing against both national markers and their peers.

It also became clear that historically, progress tracking might have been too heavily focused on simply capturing data.

Ultimately, we all agreed that there is little reason to capture attainment and progression data simply for the sake of it. It’s essential that our solution doesn’t add to a teacher’s admin pile, is easy to use and, critically, offers truly actionable insights to improve outcomes.

And this is what we believe we’ve achieved: an intuitive progress tracker that understands that tests don’t always work on young children and teachers are fundamentally best placed to know how their pupils are progressing. Speed is key, and a teacher can input the data for a whole class in just a couple of minutes.

We’re going into pilot, with a small number of schools, towards the end of the month in order to get really in-depth feedback so we can make adjustments before the full, cloud-based roll-out next year.

A word on a progress tracker for secondary schools. We know that the challenges teachers and headteachers face with older children are vastly different to primary. That is why we have two dedicated teams looking at assessment solutions, one for primary and one for secondary. We’ll keep you posted on the secondary school version of the progress tracker over the coming months.

Finally, it’s worth touching on the exciting research we’ve been conducting on absenteeism, as part of our £40 million investment into SIMS Next Gen. The report, Engaging on Absenteeism, is crammed full of Next Gen thinking that powers real-world insight from teachers, headteachers and world-class experts.

Visit our website and follow us on Twitter @SIMS_ESS or LinkedIn to keep up with the latest developments.

Ian.

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