School development planning at our school has always involved the thoughts and ideas of all staff and provided a clear vision for what will be the next stage. On many occasions, the plan has written itself as the school has evolved and made allowances for future changes.
Last summer we were invited to attend an introduction to Schoolcentre.net, a software package from Granada Learning, to tackle this area and the related self-evaluation forms that Ofsted now demands. The session promised to give us a way of whole-school planning on the web.
So how does it work? The demonstration illustrated how whole-school plans can be set, followed and monitored using the internet, so that it can be constantly updated and accessed by all stakeholders. The web pages are easy on the eye and enable the planning of clear and concise success criteria, actions, resources/costing, evaluation and monitoring guidelines.
As the plans are live, they can be constantly updated. We love the way you can attach documents to the evaluations of completed actions. For example, we have been able to attach a video clip that the children made following plans to improve ICT in Years 5 and 6. We have also been able to attach tracking graphs, result charts and so on, as evidence of actions completed. It also highlights, using traffic-light coding, which actions are completed, overdue or being developed. The colour-coded bars automatically update as actions are evaluated. There's something quite therapeutic about the bar turning green - like ticking off a topic on your to-do list!
The software makes clear who is responsible for which actions. Because the system is live, plans are constantly updated and evolving, rather than being a job for the beginning or end of each year.
Recent changes mean that you can link to plans for the school's self-evaluation form. This constantly reviews the actions related to it and holds digital evidence of their completion. Because it's web-based, it can be set up so that Ofsted can access this area and look at the nature of the activities, how they correspond to the self-evaluation form and how they have been completed.
Two of us attended the introductory session and were immediately impressed by the training. It catered for both those more experienced and less confident with ICT. The training gave us the opportunity to set up passwords for stakeholders and to begin transferring our plans. Because we had been hands on, we came away confident that we could continue to use the software with very little support. Also, we were confident enough to talk to the rest of the staff and governors about how it worked on our return. The efficiency of Granada Learning meant that any questions we had forgotten to ask during our introductory session were answered immediately by email.
As with all initiatives, you want them to fit the needs of your school. Because of the excellent training and telephone support, we have been able to create sub-folders to enable subject action plans to be run through the same system. All our plans - whether short or long term, whole-school, subject- or group-based - provide us with live, specific, ever-evolving actions for improvement.
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Details
Schoolcentre.net
School development and planning software from Granada Learning
www.schoolcentre.net
Ratings
Fitness for purpose 5/5
Ease of use 5/5
Features 5/5
Quality 5/5
Value for money 5/5 |
